Suggestions to write LO

Suggestions for Improving Statements of Learning Outcomes

1. Begin with statement of department or program purpose, linked to the College's mission

2. Use active voice. For example: Students develop familiarity, NOT students will become familiar.

3. Specify and explicate broadly drawn expectations such as understand, develop, appreciate. Think about the expectations in terms of thresholds: how would you know if a student understands or appreciates? Alternatives might include the following: know, recognize, describe, use, demonstrate. The learning outcomes must be measurable. All assessment used in courses should be measures of the Learning outcomes.

4. Describe expectations positively (as a necessity) rather than conditionally: students should be able to; better: students will be able to . . . .

5. Identify the most central student learning expectations rather than a laundry list of possible expectations. Learning outcomes and assessments used should pair. The reasons you use the assessment in your course is in fact because you want to measure the learning outcomes.

6. It may be useful to distinguish lower level expectations from higher level expectations, using Blooms taxonomy. The next step in the process is to describe learning experiences that allow students to meet the expectations.


Below several examples collected from across the web:

Example 1:
Students will understand the fundamental principles;
better: Students will be able to describe the fundamental principles

Example 2:
Students will develop essential thinking and problem solving skills;
better: students will be able to demonstrate thinking and problem solving skills in specific ways .

Example 3:
Students will be introduced to major figures;
better: students will recognize and will be able to discuss the writings of major figures

Example 4:
The concentration provides comprehensive exposure to a range of topics;
better: students study diverse topics and will be able to describe the issues and use the methods of the field

Example 5:
Courses provide comparative analyses;
better: students read, write, and practice theoretical approaches and will be able to discuss their critical understandings of the respective strengths and weaknesses of those approaches

Example 6:
Students are expected to understand fundamental conceptual and theoretical propositions;
better: students will be able to describe fundamental conceptual and theoretical propositions

Example 7:
Students comprehend;
better: Students will be able to describe

Example 8: Students are taught the forms . . .;
better: Students will know and will be able to describe

EXAMPLE Learning Outcomes for group work in a course:

On completion of the course, students will have demonstrated their ability to:
- communicate effectively, both orally and in writing, with other group members during the project and in the presentation of the individual and group outcomes of the project
- develop, monitor and continually update a plan for personal contribution to the group project
- negotiate, adopt, review and comment critically on the personal role taken within the group and exercise leadership within that role
- work effectively, in a variety of roles, as part of a team, exercising independence and leadership when appropriate
- identify and apply appropriate quantitative and qualitative tools to elicit a client’s needs and to create innovative solutions to those needs
- elicit and transform a set of customer requirements into a specification for an engineering system to meet an identified need
- collect, critically evaluate and use information from a wide variety of sources to generate a range of solutions to the problems defined, and identify and use suitable criteria to select a single solution for further development
- evaluate the outcomes of the project against the original needs using suitable social, environmental, ethical, economic and commercial measures of performance.


To measure the above learning outcomes students are assessed through a combination of:
- team reports on the design and development task the team undertakes
- oral and poster presentations of the project at a residential event
- personal reflection by the student on their effectiveness as a member of the team