Article Preview
TopIntroduction
A teacher for a kindergarten class was trying to explain to her students the meaning and use of the word—ACCIDENT. After explaining, she asked the students: Dear children, suppose Monday morning I am run over by a car while I am crossing the road, what would you call that?
The whole class replied in chorus—Monday, HOLIDAY!
This is what happens when the objectives of the teacher and the student do not match! Teaching-learning process is a challenge. Teaching-learning process for medical students is a greater challenge!
In order to provide a competent physician of first contact, competency based training and assessment is needed both at the undergraduate and postgraduate level (MCI, 1997, 2000). Educational goals and objectives help us deal with the challenge of producing an Indian medical graduate with the requisite knowledge, skills and values.
Definitions: Educational Goals versus Learning Objectives
Any curriculum should communicate clearly to the student our expected outcomes in a hierarchical relationship and help them organize their thoughts on how to accomplish the task. Goals and objectives serve this purpose.
Educational/Course Goal is a global statement about the projected outcomes of the course providing overall direction and vision. They do not give details of actual student performances or their measurement. They are further broken down to determine specific LOs that students will be able to achieve.
Educational Objectives are specific targets within the general goal. Objectives interpret the goals and focus and prioritize curricular components. They are narrow and time-bound to achieve a specific task which can be measured. Goals may be intangible while objectives are tangible. Objectives are learner oriented and stated in terms of learner's behavior at the end of an instruction or a course.
Examples
Objective
Regardless of the philosophical view of how detailed the objectives should be and what nomenclature one uses, having a three tier hierarchical structure as follows is useful. The examples given help to illustrate our point (AAMC-HHMI, 2009).
Level 1/Goal
It is broad statement of general projected intentions, e.g., Apply the mechanisms of general and disease-specific pathological processes in health and disease to the prevention, diagnosis, management, and prognosis of critical human disorders.
Level 2/Objective
Specific, precise, targets within the general goal, measurable and time bound, e.g., Apply knowledge of cellular responses to injury, and the underlying etiology, biochemical and molecular alterations, to assess therapeutic interventions.
This is much more specific, it refers to the biochemical and molecular basis of cell injury.
Level 3/Sub-Objective
This level helps provide some more guidance to the students (and teachers!) by providing illustrative examples. Explain how free radicals are formed and removed from cells and conditions under which free radicals can benefit the body (e.g., free radical-mediated injury to microbes in phagocytes) or cause injury to tissues (as in reperfusions injury in myocardial infarction).
This hierarchy is comparable to Gilbuert’s (1984) general, intermediate and specific objectives.
Table 1. | Goals | Objectives |
| Broad statements, general projected intentions | Specific, precise, targets within the general goal |
| Longer time-frame | Targets set for a short term |
| Intangible | Tangible |
| Abstract, vague | Concrete |
| Hard to measure | Measurable, observable |