How to Write Learning Objectives Learners Can Actually Meet

To write a learning objective, describe one thing the learner will be able to do by the end of the lesson, in words that let you watch them do it and judge whether they did it well. “Explain what shutter speed is” is a start. “Choose a shutter speed that freezes a cyclist riding past” is better, because you can set that task and mark it. Then, before you write a word of the lesson, write the task that tests the objective.

Most guides stop at the template and a list of verbs. This one adds three things they tend to leave out: what the research says about whether objectives help, why verb lists are less reliable than they look, and how to present objectives so learners actually use them.

What a learning objective is, and what it isn’t

A learning objective is a statement of performance. Robert Mager, whose 1962 book set the pattern most guides still follow, defined it as a description of a performance you want learners to be able to show before you consider them competent (Mager, 1984). Writing for medical educators, Chatterjee and Corral put the same idea more bluntly: objectives “must focus on what the learner must be able to do, instead of what the faculty plans to teach” (Chatterjee & Corral, 2017).

That rules out three common impostors:

Not an objective	Why	An objective
“This module covers exposure.”	A topic, not a performance	“Set aperture, shutter speed and ISO to expose a backlit portrait correctly.”
“Learners will understand the exposure triangle.”	You can’t watch someone understand	“Predict how a photo will change when one setting is altered and the others are held.”
“Watch the video on metering.”	An activity, not a result	“Choose a metering mode for a high-contrast scene and justify the choice.”

Mager’s version has three parts: the performance (what the learner does), the conditions under which they do it, and the criterion for acceptable performance. Many trainers add a fourth, the audience, to make the ABCD template: Audience, Behaviour, Condition, Degree (Mager, 1984).

We’ll use one invented example throughout: a photographer building a short self-paced course that teaches hobbyists to shoot in manual mode. It’s typical of the courses independent creators sell.

Step 1: Start from what learners will do afterwards

Don’t start from your content. Start from the situation the learner will be in after the course, and what you want them to be able to do there.

For the photographer, the honest answer isn’t “know the exposure triangle”. It’s something like: “take a correctly exposed photo in manual mode, in light that would fool the automatic setting, without reaching for the auto dial.” That’s the course-level objective. Every lesson objective should build towards it.

If you’ve worked through the analysis phase of the ADDIE model, this is the performance goal from your learner brief. If you haven’t, write it now: one sentence, starting “By the end of this course, learners will be able to…”.

Step 2: Choose a verb you could watch, but don’t trust the verb list

The verb carries the objective. “Understand”, “know”, “appreciate” and “be familiar with” describe a state of mind; replace each one by asking how you’d know. If a learner understands shutter speed, what would they do? They might choose a speed for a moving subject, predict the blur at a given speed, or diagnose why a photo came out soft.

This is where most guides hand you a table of Bloom’s taxonomy verbs, sorted from “remember” to “create”. Use one if it helps you think of options, but don’t treat it as a rulebook. When Stanny analysed 30 verb lists published online, she found 433 unique verbs. Of those, 197 (45.5%) appeared at two or more levels of the taxonomy, depending on the list, and three (choose, relate and select) appeared at all six (Stanny, 2016).

The point isn’t that verbs don’t matter. It’s that the verb alone doesn’t set the level of thinking; the task does. “Explain why this photo is underexposed” is recall if the course showed that exact photo, and analysis if it’s a new one. Decide what the learner will face, then pick the verb that describes it.

Step 3: Add conditions and a standard, where they matter

A verb and an object make a usable objective. Conditions and a standard make it precise enough to build an assessment from.

• Conditions describe what the learner has, or doesn’t have: “given a camera in manual mode”, “without a light meter app”, “from a set of five unfamiliar photos”.
• The standard says what counts as good enough: “within one stop of correct exposure”, “for four out of five photos”, “in under two minutes”.

Put the two together and the photographer’s lesson objective reads: Given a backlit subject and a camera in manual mode, set aperture, shutter speed and ISO so the subject’s face is within one stop of correct exposure.

Not every objective needs a numeric standard. Chatterjee and Corral’s checklist asks “who, will do, how much or how well, of what, by when?”, and some of those answers are obvious from context (Chatterjee & Corral, 2017). Include the parts that would change how you’d design the task.

Step 4: Check the level of thinking

Once you have a draft, check what kind of thinking it asks for. The revised Bloom’s taxonomy is useful here because it splits each objective into two parts: the verb describes the cognitive process (remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, create) and the noun describes the kind of knowledge (factual, conceptual, procedural or metacognitive). The revision also loosened the old rule that the levels form a strict ladder; as Krathwohl puts it, the requirement “has been relaxed to allow the categories to overlap one another” (Krathwohl, 2002).

For a course, the useful question is simpler: does the objective ask for the thinking the learner will need afterwards? A photography course full of “name the three exposure settings” objectives will produce learners who can name them and still miss the shot. If the course-level objective is about doing, most lesson objectives should be about doing, with recall objectives only where they support it.

Step 5: Write the assessment task at the same time

This is the step that turns a list of objectives into a course. For every objective, write the task that will test it, now, before you plan the lesson. The educational psychologist John Biggs called this constructive alignment: the objectives define the performances, the teaching methods elicit them, and “the assessment tasks address those same performances” (Biggs, 1996).

For the backlit-portrait objective, the task might be: Here are three photos of the same backlit scene. Choose the one with the settings you’d use, and say which setting you’d change for the other two. If you can’t write a task, the objective isn’t finished. If the task you write tests something different from the objective, change one of them.

The online course design checklist covers what comes next: practice spread through the course and feedback on it.

Step 6: Show objectives to learners as questions

Most creators paste objectives at the top of a lesson as a bulleted list and move on. There’s some evidence that a different presentation works better.

In three lab experiments with undergraduates reading short passages on neuroscience, Sana and colleagues found that showing objectives before each passage raised final test scores compared with no objectives (55% versus 47% correct on average). But the bigger gain came from rephrasing each objective as a multiple-choice pretest question: 67% correct on the final test, against 53% for the same objectives shown as statements (Sana et al., 2020).

Two details matter for course builders. First, learners answered the pretest questions without feedback; in the third experiment, giving the correct answers straight after the pretest lowered final scores. Second, this was a short laboratory study with an immediate test, so treat it as early evidence rather than a settled rule. The cost of trying it is low: open each lesson with two or three questions drawn from its objectives, tell learners not to worry about getting them right, and let the lesson supply the answers.

Learners do use objectives when they’re given them. In a study of 185 undergraduate science students, Osueke and colleagues found that students said the objectives “helped them to narrow their focus and organize their studying” (Osueke et al., 2018).

What the research says about whether objectives help

The research case for objectives is real but narrower than the enthusiasm around them suggests.

The clearest summary is still an older meta-analysis. Klauer pooled 52 comparisons from 23 studies of objectives, directions and questions given before reading a text. They led to some improvement in learning of the material the objectives targeted, but impeded learning of material they didn’t target, so the overall gain was slight (Klauer, 1984).

That trade-off is the practical lesson. Objectives work like a spotlight: learners pay more attention to what you point at, and less to everything else. That’s useful when the objectives cover what matters, and harmful when they cover only what was easy to write down. It’s one more reason to start from the learner’s real task (step 1) rather than the content list, and to keep each lesson’s objectives few enough that the spotlight means something, which also keeps the cognitive load of each lesson manageable.

Most of this evidence comes from students reading texts in controlled settings, not adults taking self-paced courses. We’d still write objectives for every lesson, because their biggest benefit is to the designer: they force the decisions about tasks and assessment that make a course coherent. Whether they also help your learners depends on how you present them.

Before and after: five rewrites

First draft	Problem	Rewrite
Understand the exposure triangle	Not observable	Predict how a photo will change when one exposure setting is altered
Learn about metering modes	A topic, not a performance	Choose a metering mode for a high-contrast scene and justify the choice
Know how to use manual mode	Vague, no standard	Set exposure in manual mode to within one stop of correct for a backlit subject
Analyse and evaluate and create great photos	Three objectives in one, no task	Critique a set of five photos, naming the setting that would most improve each
Appreciate the importance of composition	A feeling, not a performance	Rearrange a scene so the subject follows a chosen composition rule, then explain why

Common mistakes

1. Writing objectives after the content. They end up describing what the lessons happen to cover, rather than steering what the lessons should do.
2. Too many objectives per lesson. Each objective needs explanation, practice and a check. A ten-minute lesson rarely supports more than two or three.
3. Mixing several performances into one objective. “Identify, compare and apply” is three objectives. Split them, or pick the one that matters.
4. Objectives the assessment never tests. If the quiz only checks recall, the “apply” objective is decoration. Learners will study for the quiz.
5. Hiding them. Objectives buried in a course description do little. Put them where the lesson starts, ideally as questions.

What to do next

Take one lesson from your current course. Rewrite its objectives so each starts with a verb you could watch, then write the quiz question or task that tests each one. If any objective has no task, or any task has no objective, fix that lesson before you build the next.