The Outcomes of Instruction

Basic Assumption

Learning outcomes are statements that describe significant and essential learning that learners
have achieved, and can reliably demonstrate at the end of a course or program. In other
words, learning outcomes identify what the learner will know and be able to do by the end of
a course or programe. Instruction is a purposeful activity, that is, it is a means to an end.

Goals, Objectives, and Instruction

The most imporant reason for designing instruction is to make possible the attainment of a set
of educational or training goals. The society in which we live has certain functions to perform
in serving the needs of its people or they will be a take role as what they will be to get tehir
achievement including the functioning of an individual in the society, and that can be
acquired through learning. Such as in public school, industry and the federal government,
military

Goals as Educational Outcomes

The goals as educational outcomes that refer to the learner to show their effort to get an
achievement in learning in the last of learning. Preferably, a goal is stated not in one word,
such as “reading,” but as a phrase, for example, “reading with enough fluency to focus on the
meaning of what they have read,” or “possesses positive reading habits and attitudes”
(National Assessment Governing Board, 1993). Goals are the desired outcomes of our
educational and training systems. The question to be answered is, What skills, knowledge,
and/or attitudes should students have at certain stages in their educational or training
development. To be useful to teachers and trainers, these educational and training goals must
be analyzed with regard to the capabilities that would make possible the kinds of activities
expressed in the goals. It is these capabilities that represent the proximate goals of instruction.
For example, a proximate goal of reading with fluency is that the leamerwill be able to
“paraphrase the main idea of a paragraph.” To carry out the activities required for
maintaining reading, students must possess certain lands of capabilities (knowledge, skills,
and attitudes). For example, before they can paraphrase the main idea, they have to be able to
locate it and infer the authors intent. In most cases these skills are learned through
deliberately planned instructional activities. A capability such as reading comprehension, for
example, obviously serves several purposes in supporting other lands of learning.

Goals as Training Outcomes

The difference between education and training :

Often it is the purpose or specificity of the desired outcomes. Whereas education develops
potential capabilities and dispositions, effective training depends upon acceptable
performance of the task being taught. However, training organizations that focus primarily on
skill development also have broader goals within their organizational context.
For example a goal for training in the military might be to reduce the risk of battlefield injury,
or to produce effective and efficient infantry. These goals must also be broken down into
individual capabilities and attitudes, such as the soldier will be able to assemble a weapon by
feel, in the dark, in five minutes or less. A related attitude is soldiers choose to observe safety
rules when handling a weapon.

Courses and Their Objectives

In any case, a course is usually defined rather arbitrarily by the title understood within the
local environment of the particular institution, for example, “American History,” “Beginning
French,” “Freshman English,” “Reconnaissance,” "Air Traffic Control,” “Database Design,”
and so on. The ambiguity in meaning of courses with such titles is evident. One assumes that
“American History” in grade 6 is not the same as “American History” in grade 12, but the
course tide gives no clue. Is “Freshman English” concerned with composition, literature, or
both? Is “Database Design” creating data tables, forms, and reports, or solving real-world
information management problems? These are by no means idle questions, because they
represent sources of ambiguity for students, particularly when they are planning programs of
study.

Categories of Learning Outcomes

1. Intellectual Skill
Intellectual skills are best described as things we do with symbols, like putting things into
categories, applying rules and principles, and solving problems. These skills enable
individuals to interact with their environment in terms of symbols or conceptualizations.
Intellectual skills make up the most basic and pervasive structure of formal education. They
range from such elementary skills as language (e.g., composing a sentence) to the advanced
technical skills of engineering (e.g., finding the stresses in a bridge) and economics (e.g.,
predicting the effects of currency devaluation).
2. Cognitive Strategies
Cognitive strategies are special and very important kinds of skills. They are the capabilities
that govern the individual’s own learning, remembering, and thinking behavior. For example,
they control behavior when reading with the intent to leam and the internal methods used to
“get to the heart of a problem.” That cognitive strategies are domain specific in the case.
3. Verbal Information
Verbal information is the statement to get the learning outcomes and the kind of
knowledge we are able to state. It is knowing that, or declarative knowledge. The
verbal information we learn in school is in part “for the course only” and in part the
kind of knowledge we are expected to be able to recall readily as adults.
The learner usually acquires a great deal of information from formal instruction.
Much is also learned in an incidental fashion. Such information is stored in the
learner’s memory, but it is not necessarily “memorized” in the sense that it can be
repeated verbatim. Something like the gist of paragraph-long passages is stored in
memory and recalled when the occasion demands.
4. Motor Skill
The function of the skill, as a capability, is simply to make possible the motor performance.
Motor skills play a part in almost everything a person says or does.
 Motor skills learned as part of formal school instruction, such as printing letters,
drawing a straight line, or aligning a pointer on a dial face. The acquisition of a motor
skill can be reasonably inferred when students can perform the act in a variety of
contexts.

5. Attitude
Attitude is to amplify an individuals positive or negative reaction toward some person,
thing, or situation. The schools are often expected to establish socially approved
attitudes, such as respect for other people, cooperativeness, personal responsibility, as
well as positive attitudes toward knowledge and learning and an attitude of self-
efficacy.

Human Capibilities as Course Goals

The major categories, which cut across the “content” of courses, are the five we have
described. From the standpoint of the expected outcomes of instruction, the major reason
for distinguishing these five categories is that they make possible different kinds of
human performance.

For example, a course in elementary science may foresee as general objectives such
learning outcomes as:

(1) solving problems of velocity, time, and acceleration;

(2) designing an experiment to provide a scientific test of a stated hypothesis; or

(3) valuing the activities of science.

Designing Instruction using Human Capabilities

When goals are matched with societal needs, an ideal condition exists for the planning of a total
program of education. Were such an undertaking to be attempted, the result would be, as a first
step, a fist of activities, each of which would have associated with it an estimate of its importance
in meeting the needs of the society.

Needs Analysis

When human activities derived from societal needs are in turn analyzed, they yield a set of human
capabilities. These are descriptions of what human adults in a particular society ought to know
and particularly what they ought to know how to do. There would, of course, be a relationship
between human capabilities and the subjects of the curriculum, but it would probably not be a
simple correspondence.

There are a couple of reasons why intellectual skills play a central role in designing the structure
of a course of study

1. They are die kinds of capabilities that determine what the student can do and thus are
intimately bound up with the description of a course in terms of its learning outcomes.
2. Intellectual skills have a cumulative nature; they build upon each other in a predictable
manner. Accordingly, they provide the most useful model for the sequencing of course
structure.