What’s the Goal? Dirksen Chapter 3
Similar to what we talked about in class, having a good understanding of the problem will help you set your goals, identify knowledge gaps, and asses your goal. One way you can identify the problem is by asking these questions:
- What bad thing will happen if they don’t know this?
- What are they going to actually do with this information?
- How will you know if they are doing it right?
- What does it look like if they get it wrong?
- Why is it important that they know that? Uh huh, and why is that important?
This line of questioning reminded me of a knowledge eliciting method I have used for defining goals and misconceptions in another class called Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA). It is a type of task analysis aimed at “understanding tasks that require a lot of cognitive activity from the user, such as decision-making, problem-solving, memory, attention and judgement.”
It is important to use doing words in your goals. Ultimately more complex learning doesn’t just involve a regurgitation of information, but synthesizing and actively processing of information to apply knowledge and skills in a task. I like the road map from Dirksen’s book to illustrate this example. If a learner truly “learns” something they should be able to define it, describe it, explain it, and apply it.
Other important visuals and considerations are Bloom’s taxonomy and Gery’s guide to automaticity.
Finally, understanding time in which learners can reasonably learn the goals is important. More complex skill will take time and lots of practice to develop, but if you are aware of where those goals fit in on the slow to fast scale, it will be easier to prepare your learner for success.
