Behavioural Objectives

Statements of intended learning expressed as observable learner behaviour, formulated to make teaching targets verifiable and assessment criteria explicit. The standard formulation comes from Mager (1962, Preparing Instructional Objectives, Fearon Publishers, Palo Alto), which became the template for instructional objectives across education and training.

Mager's Three Components

A complete behavioural objective specifies:

• Performance: what the learner will do, named by an observable verb (write, list, demonstrate, transcribe) rather than an internal state (know, understand, appreciate). Mager's test is whether two independent observers would agree on whether the behaviour had occurred.
• Condition: the circumstances under which the performance must be shown — tools available, prompts given, time limits, reference materials permitted or excluded. Given a recorded telephone enquiry, without a dictionary, in a one-minute exchange are conditions.
• Criterion: the standard the performance must meet to count as successful — accuracy, speed, completeness, quality. With no more than two grammatical errors, within 30 seconds, intelligible to a non-specialist listener are criteria.

A canonical Mager-form objective: Given a chart showing population data for four countries, the learner will write a 150-word description in academic register, identifying at least two trends, with no more than three grammatical errors that obscure meaning.

Origin and Context

Mager wrote against what he saw as the woolliness of curricular language in 1960s American education, where objectives like develop an appreciation of literature survived because they could neither be confirmed nor falsified. The book is itself a programmed text (it teaches its own content by the methods it advocates), reflecting the behaviourist instructional design movement of the period. The first 1962 edition appeared as Preparing Objectives for Programmed Instruction; later editions retitled to Preparing Instructional Objectives as the framework spread beyond programmed instruction. The book has remained in print across multiple editions and is among the best-selling works on instructional design.

Critique

Eisner (1967, "Educational objectives: Help or hindrance?", School Review 75(3), 250–260) raised the most cited objection. He argued that pre-specified behavioural objectives:

• exclude the expressive outcomes of education: encounters with material whose results cannot be predicted in advance
• privilege what is easy to measure over what is educationally important, distorting the curriculum toward the trivial
• treat teaching as the predictable production of pre-specified behaviour, whereas much of what happens in classrooms is genuinely emergent

Eisner did not reject objectives outright but argued for distinguishing instructional objectives (Mager-form, where appropriate) from expressive objectives, which name an encounter or activity rather than a target behaviour. The distinction reframed objective-writing as a choice of registers rather than a single technique.

Legacy in Language Teaching

Behavioural objectives shaped audiolingual-era materials and competency-based language teaching, where each unit targeted a specific can-do statement assessed by observable performance. The tradition feeds directly into contemporary learning outcomes and the can-do descriptors of the CEFR, which are Mager-form objectives at scale: each descriptor names a performance, often with conditions and an implicit criterion of intelligibility or task completion.

Critique persists alongside use. Communicative and task-based traditions accept observable performance as the unit of competence but resist atomising language into long lists of discrete behaviours, arguing that real-world tasks integrate many sub-skills in ways that resist clean decomposition.

References

• Mager, R. F. (1962). Preparing Instructional Objectives. Fearon Publishers.
• Eisner, E. W. (1967). Educational objectives: Help or hindrance? School Review, 75(3), 250–260.
• Council of Europe. (2001). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Cambridge University Press.