On-line assistant for writing course objectives

The Instructional Objective Writing Assistant (IOWA) is a simple online knowledge based system that serves to help instructors write good course objectives. Instructional objectives are important for a number of different reasons and yet objectives are often not written, are written incorrectly, or are incompletely written. Instructors can use IOWA to solve the problems of absent incorrect and incomplete objectives. Most objectives are incorrect in that they are usually written in a form that cannot be observed or measured, thus making it impossible to determine whether or not the objectives have been met. The IOWA Web site contains instructions and suggestions on how to write objectives that are observable and measurable. A set of objectives is incomplete if it doesn't include objectives for all levels of thinking or if the objectives are focused on levels of thinking that are not appropriate for the course. The knowledge based system, which is written in Java and posted as an applet on the IOWA Web site, can help to correct this problem. The program asks the instructor questions about the course for which objectives are to be written and then returns a graph, based on the input of the instructor, that shows which levels of cognition should be focused on when writing objectives. The instructor then uses this graph, along with the suggestions, instructions, hints and examples provided on the rest of the Web site, to write objectives that are correct and complete. The paper presents the motivation for creating IOWA, the knowledge upon which IOWA is based, how IOWA works, and initial results from the use of IOWA.