Learning Targets

Learning targets are statements about the information or skills students need to learn. There is a hierarchy of learning targets: State Standards are learning targets written by the local government mandating what students should know or master by a certain grade. These can be broken down into “content standards” written within a discipline to mandate what the student should know after instruction, or as “performance standards” which state what the student should be able to do after the content is learned. With these two types of standards the teacher shapes the curriculum. The teacher takes the content and performance standards and breaks them down into specific learning targets which define, in concise language, what the student will do or learn and be assessed on. These specific learning targets may be either “mastery learning targets” that can be assessed by knowledge recall such as a multiple choice test, or “developmental learning targets” which require several modes of assessment to accommodate the lifelong nature of the learning goal.

There are four major ways that learning targets contribute to improved classroom assessment. The instructor is able to align assessments with mastery learning targets and ensure that the assessment is really evaluating what the student is supposed to be learning from that unit. Secondly, learning targets allows the instructor to evaluate a student's progress in developmental domains by giving them concrete skills and processes that can be assessed in part and contribute to an overall assessment of the degree to which a student is mastering the developmental learning target at that level. Third, learning targets allow instructors to align assessments with state standards. This is especially true when the learning targets are derived directly from the state standards (which are really just learning targets) (Nitko 2011)! Fourthly, since learning targets specify what student should achieve by the end of instruction (Nitko 2011) the student, and their parents, will have scaffolding around what to be assessed on and thus study accordingly.

Nitko, Anthony J. (2011). Educational Assessment of Students. Boston, MA: Pearson.

(Image credit) Townsend, Matt (2012) Target's City Ambitions. Retrieved from

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-31/targets-city-ambitions