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3 Steps to Help You Write Better Learning Objectives

Writing clear, concise, and effective learning objectives or outcomes can be a tricky business. Each objective should begin with an action verb that fits the level of learning being tested. Here's a step-by-step approach to writing them.

#1  Base them on Bloom's

Start by basing the objectives on Bloom's Taxonomy, listed here in ascending order of complexity, from the simplest level to the most complex:

• Remembering: Recalling information
• Understanding: Explaining a new concept
• Applying: Using information in a new way
• Analyzing: Differentiating between different parts
• Evaluating: Supporting a stand or decision
• Creating: Devising a new product or point of view

Click to enlarge.

#2  Write a stem

The stem sets up each objective and outlines the task and timetable. Here are a few examples:

• After completing the lesson, the student will be able to:
• By completing the assigned activities, the student will demonstrate the ability to:
• At the conclusion of the course/unit/study, the student will:

#3 Action!

Using an action verb, list the actual product, process, or outcome. Like so:

• identify key structures of the cardiovascular system
• discuss the roles of the heart, arteries and veins as a part of the cardiovascular system
• list common infectious diseases
• identify the links in the chain of infection
• differentiate between the stages of disease
• describe the body's defense mechanisms
• demonstrate the performance of hand washing with soap and water
• demonstrate the performance of hand sanitization with an alcohol-based hand rub

Helpful verbs

Here's a handy guide to help you come up with just the write verb to start off your objective.

Adapted from www.educationoasis.com

5 Reasons We Have Chapters Reviewed by Experts

So, you're written a few chapters in your textbook and they've been fine-tuned by a developmental editor. Now what?

Now come the chapter reviews.

We'll send your manuscript to a number of experts for their feedback, and we'll pay close attention to what they say. That's because a manuscript review serves different purposes than a proposal review. Here are five of those purposes.

1. Check for clinical accuracy

The most important reason to obtain manuscript reviews from subject matter experts is to make sure that all the clinical content is fully accurate. Yes, you're authoring a book, and yes, you're an expert too, don't worry, no one can take that away from you.

Here's the thing. Whatever you write in the book, when it's finally published, will be the Word. And the Word will be yours. And so will the lion's share of the responsibility for errors in those Words.

We do our part, certainly, and we want to help do your part too. So we show your Words to people who can best point out where they might be confusing, incomplete, or inaccurate.

Even if they misread some Words and think you've made an error but actually you haven't, that's good too. It tells us where there are slight hiccups in the writing, so we can smooth them over.

All praise the Reviewers!

2. Double-check features and flow

You know all those wonderful features you planned to include in the book—key terms, themed sidebars, case studies, whatever? Well, we want to see if they actually work and do what we intend them to do.

If the reviewers confirm what we thought, yay for us. If not, we can fix the issues and move ahead.

3. Verify the vision

When you set out to write your book, you and your acquisitions editor formed a clear idea of what the book would be, who it was for, and what would make it stand out above the crowd. Now it's time to make sure we stuck to that vision or, if we didn't, to make sure our deviations made sense.

4. Procure promotional points of view

The reviewers love your book, don't they? Of course they do. We use manuscript reviews to obtain quotes we can use in promotional materials and give to our sales reps, so they better understand the key sales points about the book and how best to sell it.

When you have a reviewer write something like, "This is an extremely well-written text, and I can't wait to adopt it"—that's gold.

5. Seed the market

Manuscript reviews also help potential adopters become invested in the product. If they think their feedback is helping, if they think we really listen to it and make adjustments accordingly—and believe me, we do—a kind of emotional bond can begin to form between the book and the reviewer.

It takes time, but it pays off. When the book publishes, those reviewers will be more likely to adopt the book and recommend it to their colleagues at other schools.

And you can take those Words to the bank.

How to Print Using Microsoft XPS Document Writer

Ever wanted to create a PDF document from, say, a Word or Excel document but don't have a PDF editor?

Fear not, PC users. Microsoft builds a PDF-like printer into Windows so you can do just that. It's not called PDF, though, it's called XPS and it prints through a program called XPS Document Writer. But it works the same way.

Here are instructions direct from Microsoft that explain how to use this nifty little program.

What are XPS documents?

The XPS Document Writer allows you to create .xps files using any program that you run on Windows. XPS documents look the same in print as they do on the screen. They are portable, like any other file that you can e–mail or transfer using a CD, DVD, universal serial bus (USB) drive, or network connection. They are also easy to share because you can view them on any computer where an XPS viewer is installed, even if the computer does not have the same programs that you used to create the original documents.

When to use XPS

Print to the XPS Document Writer when you want to create, send, and share or publish documents that you do not want other people to modify, or when you want to print a document or display it online exactly as it appears on your screen. It's also a good idea to create an XPS document for files that contain graphics or illustrations that might otherwise display differently in print than online or on computers with different monitors.

How to print to the XPS Document Writer

• Open the document or file that you want to print to .xps format, and then click Print. In most programs, the print option is available from the File menu.

Here's a screenshot from the print dialog within Amazing Charts.

• In the Print dialog box, select Microsoft XPS Document Writer.
• To view the document using the XPS viewer after you print it, click Preferences, click the XPS Documents tab, and then make sure that the Automatically open XPS documents using the XPS viewer check box is selected.
• Print the document or file.
• When prompted, enter a file name and browse to the location where you want to save the .xps file. Windows will save .xps files in your Documents folder by default.

After printing to the .xps file format, you can view an XPS document by browsing to it and opening it. You can print a paper copy, share the XPS document, or send it to a commercial printer or other people in any way that you prefer.

For Vista users, check out this YouTube video about XPS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo_ueKB0GEY

F.A. Davis Author James Cawley to Receive Prestigious Award

I am absolutely thrilled to announce that one of our authors, the inimitable and brilliant James F. (Jim) Cawley, MPH, PA-C, will receive the 2011 Eugene A. Stead Jr. Award of Achievement from the American Academy of Physician Assistants (AAPA) at its annual conference in June.

Jim is being recognized for the "groundbreaking research he has done on PAs, which has advanced the PA profession and helped increase access to primary care through the use of PAs." Named after the late Gene Stead, founder of the PA profession, the Stead Award is given to an individual for "lifetime work that has a broad and significant impact on the PA profession as a whole."

Co-author of our book Physician Assistant: Policy and Practice, Jim has published extensively on primary care and health workforce policy. His early, and timely, papers about the budding profession helped policy makers recognize PAs as potential contributors to effective and efficient healthcare delivery. He has played a pivotal role in moving the PA profession forward through his work as a certified practitioner, educator, scholar, and leader. He is founder and director of The George Washington University's joint Physician Assistant-MPH program, the first of its type in the nation. The program trains individuals for careers that bridge clinical practice and prevention.

He is a Distinguished Fellow of the AAPA and a former president of the PA Foundation and the Physician Assistant Education Association. He served for five years on the National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants, including on its Executive Committee. He is past member and vice chair of the federal Advisory Committee for Training in Primary Care Medicine and Dentistry, and a member of AAPA's Professional Education and Development Council and its Research Steering Committee.

Currently, Jim is Professor and Vice Chair in the Department of Prevention and Community Health at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services. He is also a professor in the Department of Health Care Sciences in the GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

A PA for 35 years, Jim is a 1974 graduate of the Touro College PA program and holds an MPH degree in epidemiology from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

On behalf of all of us at F.A. Davis, I extend to Jim our heartiest congratulations on this signal honor so much deserved.

(And no, Jim, you can't add 200 pages to the next edition!)

E-Books and retrofitting content

E-book sales have skyrocketed recently, with Amazon reporting that Kindle sales now out-sell not only hard cover books but paperbacks as well and Barnes & Noble citing record profits from its e-books for the Nook.

For us educational publishers, that's great but what have e-books done for us lately?

The answer is, not much. E-books and e-readers have pretty much bombed on college campuses across the nation. For instance, the Kindle DX was supposed to revolutionize the way college students study. Not even close.

Daniel Turner, Associate Dean, Masters Programs, at the University of Washington, explained it best, telling Businessweek last year, "It's an amazing device for recreational reading, but it's not quite ready for prime time in higher education."

E-texts haven't taken off yet for one reason, and one reason only: We publishers have been attacking the issue all wrong, and until we change, the outlook will remain the same.

Retrofitting content

What we've all been doing, pretty much, is taking our existing content and retrofitting it for an electronic medium. We publish a book as print on paper (POP). We convert the book to PDF, XML, or some other electronic format. We put the book on the market and wonder why the sales don't explode.

The problem isn't with the conversion, you see, but with the content itself. We cannot take a product that was conceptualized and then built word by word by carefully chosen word—with a POP product in mind—and then retrofit it to an interactive medium. The writing itself must start out that way.

When we write a textbook, we generally start out with a set of objectives or outcomes, cover key terms, introduce the chapter, and then build the content in a sequence and format that makes sense for the content. It's a great method for a book. Perfect, really. But it falls short for an interactive product.

Forward-fitting the content

To develop a successful e-text we need to build it the way an e-student (the human reading an e-text) would use it. That means we would begin, basically, with a summary.

Yes, a summary. We would start with the core concepts the students need to learn and embed in those concepts links or other functionality that allows the reader to explore the content in the order they’re most interested in. We would need to allow for a sequential flow of content for linear learners while also building “content clouds” that would allow flexibility in learning sequence. And of course we need to add in all the functionality that has been developed to allow the e-student to highlight, take and share notes, download content updates, look up words, phrases, and references quickly, and other similar e-reader functions.

I firmly believe that only after we publishers start to develop products with e-students in mind will the e-text market live up to its potential.