Long-Term Objectives

Description of the Strategy

Long-term objectives are descriptions of performance or behavior that are used to represent the desired outcomes of learning interventions. Like short-term objectives, they are the focal point of a treatment or lesson plan and provide a starting point for instructional design, as well as a framework for developing appropriate assessments and evaluations. Typically, [Page 1382]all objectives are expected to contain at least five component statements: (1) content to be learned, (2) behavior the student will display to illustrate that the learning has occurred, (3) conditions under which the behaviors will be displayed, (4) criteria for acceptable performance, and (5) how long a student has to learn an objective. Term refers to the amount of time the student will be allowed to work on the material and the size and complexity of the domain of material to be specified in the objective.

Long-term and short-term objectives differ from each other in the scope of the content they represent and the duration of the instruction they allow. In terms of scope, long-term objectives call for the mastery of more content, or of more complex content, than shortterm objectives. In terms of duration, long-term objectives specify more time for completion than do short-term objectives, although no set time frame exists. By tradition, and in part by the influence of special education policy, long-term objectives have typically been thought of as covering 1 year's worth of instructional time or content.

Decisions about the amount of time a student will be allowed to work on learning a domain of material are difficult for several reasons. Foremost among these is the understanding that the time it takes a student to learn something depends on the current skills of the student, the effectiveness of the teacher, and the resources allocated to instruction. Because each of these factors (and many others) may interact with the others to influence the speed of new learning, the determination of an expected date for mastery of an objective can be difficult. In the case of long-term objectives, considerable history supports dividing the school curriculum into yearly segments. However, the practice becomes more complex when trying to specify long-term objectives for students who have fallen behind and are expected to make more than 1 year's worth of growth in the curriculum during a given school year. In these cases, the amount of material to be learned per time unit must actually be greater than normal if the student is going to make up for past deficiencies while closing the gap with typically progressing students.

One way to specify long-term objectives is to identify a general outcome measure that reflects many skills of interest. For example, when teaching reading, a teacher could work from a number of short-term objectives targeting specific code content, such as consonants, vowels, and phonetically regular clusters, or use a single target, such as passage reading. In this case, the passage-reading objective would prompt the collection of oral reading samples as the general outcome measure. Because learning the specific code skills would be reflected in increased mastery of oral reading performance, the single long-term objective presumably would provide sufficient focus for instruction and evaluation of learning.

...