Do I have to teach and test every instructional objective?

There are two common questions I get related to course instructional objectives. First, do I have to teach or cover every objective in class, and second, do I need to have a test question for every objective? 

The operative word in both of these questions is every. The first question of whether you have to “teach” every objective, the answer is no. Many years back, I forgot to tell an ER doctor who was coming in to lecture that he did not have to teach to each objective, especially since his particular topic had upwards of 50. You could imagine my surprise as I watched him fly through the material, noting on each slide what objective he was covering. Somehow he managed to get through all the objectives, over 200 slides, in 3 hours! I learned later he had been practicing for days to make sure he made it through all the material in the given time. Then I shared with him that I forgot to let him know he didn’t have to do that. Fortunately, we both laughed, and he was relieved as he would be returning for additional lectures in the course.

But there is a caveat here. You must inform your students in their syllabus (I would remind them in person as well) that the course will not provide a lecture or class activity for every topic or concept they will be expected to learn. However, they are still responsible for learning that material.

Here is an example of what I put in my syllabi. Feel free to use or modify it.

Students are responsible for all course instructional objectives, whether or not they are covered through lectures or in-class activities. Exam questions will be based on material covered in class, required reading assignments, and other course defined activities, sources, or documents provided. All exam questions will be based on the course instructional objectives. The use of other resources outside of those specified for the course is permitted; however, examination questions will be based solely on course defined material.

It is our responsibility to make sure that we provide the students with the required reading and other course defined materials for where we want them to go to learn the information in the objective.  A key point here is that you want them to use the resources you have defined. We know students use other sources to help them learn, but when it comes down to assessing them against the course learning outcomes and instructional objectives, we need all students going to the same source. Otherwise, our ability to evaluate them against what was taught and what we asked them to learn from the sources we provided falls apart.

Let’s take the second question about testing every objective. The instructional objectives for your course define the pathway to the knowledge, skills, and attitudes the students must learn by the end of a segment of learning, such as a module or even a single lecture. They communicate to the students what they need to learn and how they need to learn it. Therefore, when written correctly, course instructional objectives provide a blueprint for what can be included on an exam or performance assessment and serves to guide both the students in their studying and the faculty member in creating the assessment.

The course instructional objectives must be used to guide the content of the assessment. Each question or performance task (i.e. perform a skin exam) being assessed must be tethered to the objective it is evaluating. Making sure the assessment matches the objectives helps us to determine better whether the students learned what we asked them to learn. I use a numbering system for objectives. Next to each question, I note the objective(s) it covers. Doing this provides three key benefits. First, it makes sure every item on the assessment is from the objectives. Second, if a student has a concern about a question after the test – I can refer them back to the objective used for that question so they review the material. Third, once the students genuinely know that you are writing examinations in this way, their trust goes up in the fairness of the exams, and the challenges about inappropriate or unrelated questions drop significantly.

An additional question that comes up is whether you can have more than one question for one objective. The answer is yes. This is especially true of higher learning objectives, such as when our objectives are asking students to be able to apply, synthesize, or assess.

For example, if your instructional objective reads: By the end of this module, students will be able to select and interpret the appropriate diagnostics studies for the types of pneumonia covered in this module. I think you could see how several questions could be generated from this one objective.

One of my goals around assessment is that I want the students to do well so they could demonstrate what they learned.  Since assessments tend to create anxiety and stress in students, when an exam was approaching, I would remind them that every question is linked to one or more of the course instructional objectives. Therefore, their best approach to studying is the use the objectives and to make sure they knew all of what each one covered. I also shared with them that it was possible that not every objective would be on the exam and that I could create multiple questions from one objective. Over the years I found that sharing this with students helped to reduce some of their anxiety about “what would be on the test,” and also affirmed my commitment to them that they would be fairly evaluated on the material covered in the course and what they have been asked to learn.  I think we have all had the frightening and frustrating experience of taking an exam and feeling like it must have been for some other course than the one we were in!

At the end of the day, I believe our mission is to ensure that students are learning. When and how we assess them plays a crucial role in determining if they have achieved the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed. Being sure to inform the students about how they will be evaluated and provide them with an understanding of how best to use the resources we provide them so they can be successful is so vital to answering the question, “Did they learn what we needed them to learn?”