Not much. They are still around but often goes by an alias.
Introduced in the early 20th century, behavioral objectives are like wallpaper in a favorite room that is stripped and then re-papered with wallpaper of a different hue but closely resembling the discarded debris. In short, the phrase has different names today (e.g., performance objectives, learner outcomes, competencies-based outcomes) but remains common across the educational domain as well as in business, medicine, and other professional work. They are now a permanent fixture of organizations but not called "behavioral objectives."
Where Did the Idea Originate?
The efficiency-driven wing of early 20th century progressives, inspired by management innovator Frederick Taylor, educational psychologist Edward Thorndike, and other university-based academics saw the rational design of lessons as important. In the 1930s and 1940s, Ralph Tyler of the University of Chicago and head evaluator of the Eight Year Study championed behavioral objectives and scientific ways of assessing student and school outcomes. The advent of teaching machines and the work of B.F. Skinner advanced the breaking down of specific knowledge and skills into constituent parts that could be taught and measured. Instructional designers began pressing K-12 educators to adopt the idea of "behavioral objectives" as early as the late-1950s. They advocated that educators must state clearly and objectively exactly what they wanted students to learn, the conditions under which the students will learn specific content and skills, and how these educators will know students have indeed learned what was intended.
Psychologists who championed instructional design, many of whom were trained as behaviorists such as B.F. Skinner, Robert Gagne', Benjamin Bloom, Robert Mager,and others in the 1940s and 1950s--along with Tyler--see above--produced articles and books throughout the 1960s that laid out how teachers should and could compose and specific objectives for their lessons in terms sufficiently clear to determine whether or not students had learned what was intended in the lesson (see here).
What Are Behavioral Objectives?
Sometimes called "learning" or "performance" objectives, Robert Mager laid out the three parts that every behavioral objective must contain: what the learner will do (not the teacher or instructional materials), the conditions under which the learner performs, and the criteria to judge how well the learner has performed the task.
Examples of such objectives across academic subjects are:
*The students will be able to classify the changes of state matter undergoes when given a description of the shape and volume.
*Given four works of short fiction of contrasting genres, the student will analyze and
match each work with its correct genre.
*Using the washingtonpost.com Web site, the student will correctly identify and print out two examples each of a news article and an editorial regarding a topical new item.
*Given twenty examples of incorrect verb tense usage, the student will identify and correct a minimum of sixteen instances.
Sometimes, behavioral objectives can be put into words that young children can understand such as:
What Problems Did Behavioral Objectives Intend to Solve
Because behavioral objectives drive a lesson, according to those championing "performance" or "competency learning outcome", these objectives are too often stated as to what the teacher does rather than what the student will do and learn . Even when objectives are phrased as what students will do, they use language that is ambiguous and hard to demonstrate that learning occurred.
Examples of such lesson objectives are easy to find: "teacher will read story to kindergartners," "I will define the lunar cycle for students," "teacher will interpret the meaning of Paradise Lost," "students will develop a three-dimensional form through using wire and wood."
Or consider unit on colonialism in America that listed the following objectives:
Students will understand how learning U.S. history will help them
reach their goals.
Students will get an overview of U.S. history from colonization to the
Civil War.
Students will use maps to understand the process of colonization.
Students will learn about the geography of each group of colonies
and how geography affected their economies.
Students will review two persuasive essays about the centrality of
money in America and write responses.
These are the problems that behavioral objectives sought to solve.
Do Behavioral Objectives Work?
No one knows for sure. If "work" means their ubiquity in lesson and unit plans across the country, the answer is yes. But if "work" asks about their effectiveness in improving the quality of a lesson or what students learn, such research is slim to sparse. Linking academic improvement to the quality of behavioral objectives is, well, nigh impossible (see here, here, and here).
What Happened To Behavioral Objectives?*
Not much. Under different labels, they are everywhere in curriculum manuals, district budgets, proposals to donors, and government agency programs.
In visiting classrooms throughout Silicon Valley in 2016, I often saw listed on a whiteboard, the agenda for the day. Usually, the first item was the lesson objective. For example, in an Advanced Placement Physics class at Los Altos High School that I observed in September 2016, the teacher had written on the whiteboard the following objective for the lesson: Students will be able to (SWBAT) create instructional videos using whiteboard animations in order to demonstrate problem solving skills and provide instructional support to peers.
For those eager to "personalize learning," one way is to list the skill and content competencies that students will learn at different paces, usually through software, in a unit and lesson. These competencies are behavioral objectives in disguise (see here and here).
Educators may not call them "behavioral objectives" today but they are commonly built into daily lesson plans, student assessments and teacher evaluations.
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In a later post, I will describe a parallel innovation within private and public organizations called "Management by Objectives" (MBO). Authored by management guru Peter Drucker in the mid-1950s, it spread rapidly in the late-1960s in federal agencies under the Nixon administration aimed at holding agency officials accountable for outcomes they had specified. By the early 1970s, MBO has become the organizational reform du jour among private and public sector leaders. By the early 1980s, it had become passe'.
If behavioral objectives were for teachers, MBO was for CEOs, federal and state agency heads, middle managers in the private sector and principals, superintendents, and school boards in K-12 and higher education. In K-12 schools, MBO and behavioral objectives were joined at the hip in laying out a format for the introduction of accountability for assessing student, school, and district outcomes.
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