Setting out objectives at the beginning of a course is an essential step in providing a framework into which individual lessons will fit. An instructional objective, sometimes called a behavioral objective, is a statement of skills or concepts that students are expected to know at the end of some period of instruction. Typically, an instructional objective is stated in such a way as to make clear how the objective will be measured.

In planning lessons, it is important to consider the skills required in the tasks to be taught or assigned. These skills could themselves be broken down into sub-skills. The teacher must be aware of the sub=skills involved in any learning task to be certain that students know what they need to know to succeed. Before assigning the library report task, the teacher would need to be sure that students knew how to use the card catalog and book indexes, among other things, and could comprehend and write expository material.

The process of breaking tasks or objectives down into their simpler components is called task analysis. In planning a lesson, a three-step process for task analysis may be used: Identify prerequisite skills, Identify component skills, Plan how component skills will be assembled into the final skill.

Because instructional objectives are stated in terms of how they will be measured, it is clear that objectives are closely linked to assessment. An assessment is any measure of the degree to which students have learned the objectives set out for them. Most assessments in schools are tests or quizzes, or informal verbal assessments such as questions in class. One critical principle of assessment is that assessments and objectives must be clearly linked. Students learn some proportion of what they are taught; the greater the overlap between what was taught and what is tested, the better students will score on the test and the more accurately any need for additional instruction can be determined.

BLOOM'S TAXONOMY In 1956, Benjamin Bloom and some fellow researchers published a taxonomy of educational objectives that has been extremely influential in the research and practice of education ever since. Bloom and his colleagues categorized objectives from simple to complex or from factual to conceptual. The key elements of what is commonly called Bloom's taxonomy: Knowledge (recalling information), Comprehension (translating, interpreting, or extrapolating information), Application (using principles or abstractions to solve novel or real-life problems), Analysis (breaking down complex information or ideas into simpler parts to understand how the parts relate or are organized, Synthesis (creation of something that did not exist before), Evaluation (judging something against a given standard).

The primary importance of Bloom's taxonomy is in its reminder that we want students to have many levels of skills.

Learning facts and skills is not the only important goal of instruction. Sometimes the emotions /feelings students have toward a subject or about their own skills are at least as important as how much information they learn. Instructional goals related to attitudes and values are called affective objectives. In planning instruction, it is important to consider affective as well as cognitive objectives.

Evaluation, or assessment, refers to all the means used in schools to formally measure student performance (Weber, 1999; Wiggins, 1999). These include quizzes and tests, written evaluations, and grades. Student evaluation usually focuses on academic achievement, but many schools also assess behaviors and attitudes.

Student evaluations serve six primary purposes:

1. Feedback to students
2. Feedback to teachers
3. Information to parents
4. Information for selection and certification
5. Information for accountability
6. Incentives to increase student effort

Often, evaluations of students serve as data for the evaluation of teachers, schools, districts, or even states, especially today with the NCLB legislation. Every state has some form of statewide testing program that allows the states to rank every school in terms of student performance. In addition to state tests, school districts often use tests for similar purposes (for example, in grades not tested by the state). These test scores are also often used in evaluations of principals, teachers, and superintendents. Consequently, these tests are taken very seriously.

One important use of evaluations is to motivate students to give their best efforts. Formative evaluations might even be made "on the fly" during instruction through oral or brief written learning probes. In contrast, summative evaluation refers to tests of student knowledge at the end of instructional units (such as final exams). Summative evaluations may or may not be frequent, but they must be reliable and (in general) should allow for comparisons among students. Summative evaluations should also be closely tied to formative evaluations and to course objectives.

The first step in the test development process is to decide which concept domains the test will measure and how many test items will be allocated to each concept. Test items that can be scored correct or incorrect without the need for interpretation are referred to as selected-response items. Multiple-choice, true-false, and matching items are the most common forms. Note that the correct answer appears on the test and the student's task is to select it. There is no ambiguity about whether the student has or has not selected the correct answer.

Constructed-response items require the student to supply rather than to select the answer. They also usually require some degree of judgment in scoring. The simplest form is fill-in-the-blank items, which can often be written to reduce or eliminate ambiguity in scoring. Additionally, there are short essay questions and long essay items.

After much criticism of standardized testing, critics have developed and implemented alternative assessment systems that are designed to avoid the problems of typical multiple-choice tests. The key idea behind the testing alternatives is that students should be asked to document their learning or demonstrate that they can actually do something real with the information and skills they have learned in school.

One popular form of alternative assessment is called portfolio assessment: the collection and evaluation of samples of student work over an extended period. Teachers may collect student compositions, projects, and other evidence of higher-order functioning and use this evidence to evaluate student progress over time. Portfolio assessment has important uses when teachers want to evaluate students for reports to parents or other within-school purposes. When combined with a consistent and public rubric, portfolios showing improvement over time can provide powerful evidence of change to parents and to students themselves. A key requirement for the use of performance grading is collection of work samples from students that indicate their level of performance on a developmental sequence. Collecting and evaluating work that students are already doing in class (such as compositions, lab reports, or projects) is called portfolio assessment.

Many educators feel that grading is one of the most difficult tasks of the teaching/learning process. Atypical assessments may be due to a number of causes, some evident and some not-so-evident. Nonetheless, it is the responsibility of the teacher to make sure that the standards are clear, the grades reflect the standards, and that all information is communicated appropriately to all relevant constituents.