Field Experience: Developing Learning Objectives

Developing Learning Objectives

Your learning objectives should come from educational needs that you have identified for yourself. The Field Experience Program gives you the opportunity to fill these educational needs with individualized learning. Ask yourself: What are your career aspirations? What sort of work do you want to seek upon graduation? In five years? Then find out what skills and competencies are required to do that job. Speak to professionals doing that type of work and read the professional literature. Those skills and competencies may be addressed in one of more SILS courses. Investigate syllabi and speak to instructors of possibly relevant courses. However, some skills and competencies may not be addressed in any SILS courses, or may not be addressed in sufficient depth of your needs. In that case, you may develop your learning objectives accordingly.

Learning objectives should describe what you will learn during your field experience, not the tasks you will perform at your field experience site. Here are some examples of good learning objectives for field experiences:

To gain skill in question negotiation and the selection of relevant resources in reference interactions
To increase my understanding of the processes involved in processing, arranging, and describing artifacts to prepare them for exhibition in a museum
To develop the ability to install, configure, and administer Apache web server software
To gain knowledge of spatial analysis techniques with geographic information systems