ABSTRACT
Learning objectives and assessments are helpful to teachers and students. Objectives provide specic details for meeting the goals of a lesson or unit. We will discuss in this chapter not only how objectives provide a focus for lessons and units, but also that they direct your assessments of your students’ learning. Current thinking about student learning suggests that teachers and students must know how they will be assessed before a lesson or unit even begins. This idea is often referred to as a “backward design model,” because the teacher designs lessons with the endgoal in mind. Wiggins and McTighe (2000) describe backward design as follows: “One starts with the end-the desired results-and then derives the curriculum from the evidence of learning called for by the standard (learning objective) and the teaching needed to equip students to perform” (p. 8). Thus, objectives and assessment are closely connected, and this is why we will examine them together in the chapter.
