...write effective intended learning outcomes.
As part of the Canonilo project, over 3000 chemistry-related intended learning outcomes (ILOs) were harvested from miscellaneous sources on the Web, but mainly from the specifications documents of the UK assessment boards for A-level and GCSE chemistry. Whilst the aim was to analyse these for syntactical and semantic structure, it was difficult not to notice how poorly many of the ILOs were expressed.
There are literally hundreds of guides on the Web on how to write good ILOs. Almost all of them make the recommendation that verb constructions such as understand..., understand that..., have an understanding of..., show an awareness of..., have an appreciation of... are to be avoided.
This advice is well-founded. Without going in to too much detail, the aim of using ILOs is essentially to maximise the common ground between teacher and student in the knowledge that they consider should be gained at the completion of a course of instruction.
The verb constructions mentioned above do not maximise the common ground. Student and teacher will not have a clear idea about what the other means by the expression understand that...
Hence the fact that ILOs should have at their heart dynamic verbs such as describe, define, state, list, calculate, and the rest of the usual suspects. The knowledge that a student must attain is now much clearer - it is the knowledge that enables him or her to describe, define, state, list and calculate...
Not all of the sources of the specification documents - AQA, CIE, CCEA, OCR, WJEC - were equally culpable. Some were very much better than others. However, one A-level specification document had around 30% of its ILOs starting with the verb understand: Understand the concept of..., Understand the importance of..., Understand how..., Understand that..., Understand qualitatively how...
The chemistry students involved are not being best served by this state of affairs.
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