Tips on Writing Student Learning Outcomes

Learning outcomes can be at the university, program or course level. They may be defined as the change in a student’s knowledge or skills as a result of the student’s experience. The focus of the learning outcomes should be on the results of learning, and not on the process used to accomplish the learning. The learning outcomes should be communicated with students so they understand the expectations. Having too many outcomes can be confusing and hard to achieve and assess. It is often advantageous to keep it simple with a core set of learning outcomes that make sense and have clear benefits for the students. 

Try keeping the following questions in mind when developing learning outcomes.

·         What are your goals? What knowledge or skills do you want students to posses when they finish the course/program?

·         How will you know when a change in the student’s knowledge or skills has occurred? What specifically will be different about the students?

·         How will you assess the degree to which the students have achieved the learning outcome?

Resources for developing outcomes

Guide to writing learning outcomes - a resource worksheet from Anthology (formerly Campus) that will walk you the key components of outcome statements and provide some practice exercises.

Bloom's Taxonomy - may be helpful if you are writing outcomes for knowledge. It breaks down learning into six levels. Each level is defined in the flower-shaped table and sample verbs are given that may be used in writing the learning outcomes. You may want to decide which level of learning is desired for each learning outcome you are developing. Once you have decided that, the sample verbs may help you write the specific language. 

Psychomotor Domain - useful for thinking about skill development.

Simpson's interpretation of Psychomotor Domain (description and suggested verbs) - as with the Bloom’s Taxonomy, once you decide the level of the skill desired, you can use the suggested verbs in the table to aid you in writing the learning outcome.