Additional resources on writing objectives

If you're coming from a teaching background, you'll find Dr. Cates' materials to be familiar and easy to work with. However, if you're coming from outside of pK-12, you may wish to consult other sources–perhaps you have performance objectives in mind, not learning objectives; maybe you're in a workforce training context or higher ed. Regardless, here are a few additional sources. You'll find that many of them are tied to Robert Mager's work.


  • Performance and Learning Objectives in Instructional Design from Don Clark. (Of course we can't have a topic without seeing what Don Clark has to say...)
  • Measurable Objectives – this is actually a multi-page web module from a Weber State University course. It's pretty good!
  • How to Write Great Learning Objectives by Kevin Kruse. This article is sprinkled all over the internet; I haven't been able to track down the original source.
  • Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy from Iowa State University's Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. Good explanation, plus you may find a list of verbs handy for translating Bloom's Taxonomy levels into learning objectives. Just addresses the cognitive domain, but that's what is used more often...
  • Robert Mager's Performance-Based Learning Objectives by Jeffrey Dalto of Vector Solutions (a training firm). This is a blog post by an instructional designer, and what's particularly useful / interesting about it isn't the main page (which is fine but doesn't present anything different from the above resources) but the links at the bottom of the page. Dalto links out to sub-topics that may be particularly relevant to your task–for example, he has a linked page on affective objectives and another on behavioral (psychomotor) objectivesÂ