With the 2022 TBLC Meeting just around the corner, we would like to bring attention to one of our featured workshops: Are Your Learning Objectives More Difficult or More Complex? What’s the Difference? This session will be presented by Cynthia and Paul Standley from The University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix. We hope you enjoy this session!

Title: Are Your Learning Objectives More Difficult or More Complex? What’s the Difference?
Presented by: Cynthia Standley – The University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix
Paul Standley from The University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix
Date & Time: Wednesday, April 13, 2022, 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM Eastern and Tuesday, April 19, 2022, 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM Eastern

As educators, we are tasked with writing learning objectives that are specific, measurable, realistic, and observable behaviors of what the learner is to do. We rely on Bloom’s Taxonomy to do this. With the advent of the flipped classroom, there is an ever-increasing need to incorporate higher-level learning objectives as students engage in active learning. This workshop will focus on writing those higher-level learning objectives. In writing these higher-level objectives, there is a tendency to write more difficult objectives, rather than more complex. Just because a learning objective is difficult doesn’t make it more complex. Students can be exerting great effort to achieve learning, but still processing at the lowest level of thinking! To move up Bloom’s taxonomy, we must engage more complexity. In this workshop, we will first review the difference between complexity and difficulty and complete a group activity to determine if the examples provided reflect increased difficulty or complexity. Then, we will move on to taking a simple, familiar task and describe questions or activities that move the task up Bloom’s Taxonomy. Finally, we will end by taking a concept students need to learn and describe questions or activities that move that concept up Bloom’s Taxonomy. Through this stepwise approach, we should clear up any misconceptions about the difference between difficulty and complexity and be better prepared to write those more complex, higher-level learning objectives!

We hope you enjoy this and our other exciting workshops.