What is the difference between a learning target and a learning objective?

A learning objective is written for the teacher, it describes what the curriculum or lesson is designed to accomplish, often in formal language aligned to standards. A learning target is written for the student, it translates that objective into first-person, plain-language terms ('I can explain why the American Revolution began') so students know what success looks like before the lesson starts.

Do learning targets need to be posted on the board every day?

Posting is one delivery mechanism, but the key requirement is that students understand the target, not that it appears on a whiteboard. Research by Jan Chappuis and Rick Stiggins emphasizes that students must be able to describe what they're learning and why, whether that's communicated verbally, written, or shown through exemplars. Blind posting without discussion provides little benefit.

How long should a learning target be?

A well-formed learning target fits in one sentence, typically 10–20 words. It names a specific skill or concept and the context in which students will demonstrate it. Compound targets ('I can identify and analyze and evaluate...') should be split into separate targets, one lesson, one target.

Should learning targets always be written as 'I can' statements?

The 'I can' format is widely used because it puts ownership squarely with the student, but it is not mandatory. 'We are learning to...' (WALT) and 'I am learning to...' (IALT) are common alternatives in UK and Australian schools. The format matters less than whether students can articulate what they're learning in their own words.

How do learning targets support formative assessment?

Learning targets are the reference point for all in-lesson checks for understanding. When students know the target, exit tickets, thumbs-up checks, and peer feedback all become self-referential, students can judge their own work against a known standard rather than guessing what the teacher wants. This self-monitoring is the core mechanism behind assessment-capable learners described by John Hattie and Helen Timperley.

Learning Targets vs. Learning Objectives — Teaching Wiki

Definition

A learning target is a concise, student-facing statement that describes what a learner will know or be able to do by the end of a single lesson or instructional sequence. It is written in plain, first-person language — typically "I can..." or "I am learning to...", and is shared with students before instruction begins, not revealed afterward as a summary of what just happened.

A learning objective, by contrast, is a teacher-facing or curriculum-facing document. It aligns the lesson to a standard, a unit plan, or a scope-and-sequence, and is typically written in formal educational language: "Students will be able to analyze the causes of World War I using primary source evidence." Both documents may describe the same intellectual work, but they serve different audiences and perform different functions.

The distinction is not semantic hairsplitting. When students know the specific target before they begin, they can direct their attention, self-monitor their progress, and ask sharper questions. When only the teacher holds the target, students are in the dark about what success looks like, they can engage busily without learning the intended thing at all.

Historical Context

The conceptual groundwork for learning targets comes from two overlapping traditions: mastery learning and assessment literacy.

Benjamin Bloom's work on mastery learning in the late 1960s and early 1970s established the principle that explicit, criterion-referenced goals — shared with students in advance, dramatically improve achievement. Bloom's 1968 paper "Learning for Mastery" argued that most students can reach high levels of learning when the criteria are clear and instruction is adjusted to meet them.

The vocabulary of "learning targets" as a distinct instructional practice was formalized primarily by Rick Stiggins and his colleagues at the Assessment Training Institute (now part of ETS) in the 1990s. Stiggins, Jan Chappuis, Steve Chappuis, and Judith Arter developed a framework distinguishing five types of learning targets: knowledge, reasoning, skill, product, and disposition. Their 2004 book Classroom Assessment for Student Learning became the standard reference, arguing that students who understand what they're learning and can monitor their own progress are fundamentally more successful than those who cannot.

Simultaneously, Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black's 1998 meta-analysis "Inside the Black Box" demonstrated that sharing learning intentions with students is among the most powerful levers in formative assessment. Wiliam later elaborated this into his five key strategies of formative assessment, with "clarifying, sharing, and understanding learning intentions and criteria for success" as the foundational strategy.

John Hattie's synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses, published in Visible Learning (2009), identified teacher clarity, including explicit communication of learning goals, as having an effect size of 0.75, well above the 0.40 threshold Hattie uses to denote meaningful impact. Teacher clarity as a construct encompasses learning targets as one of its primary operational expressions.

Key Principles

Targets Belong to the Student

A learning target fails if the teacher is the only one who understands it. The target must be written in language accessible to the age group being taught, shared at the start of the lesson, and regularly referenced throughout. Jan Chappuis (2015) describes "assessment-capable learners" — students who can answer three questions: Where am I going? Where am I now? How do I close the gap? A clear learning target answers the first question.

One Lesson, One Target

A single lesson should have a single primary learning target. When teachers list three to five targets for a 45-minute class, students cannot prioritize or self-monitor effectively. A lesson that seems to require multiple targets is usually a multi-day sequence that has not been properly broken down, or it conflates a skill target with a knowledge target that serves as prerequisite. Breaking these apart forces sharper lesson design.

Targets Are Specific, Not Vague

"I can understand fractions" is not a learning target, it is a topic label. A proper target names the specific cognitive operation and the context: "I can explain why 3/4 and 6/8 are equivalent using a number line." Specificity is what makes the target usable for self-assessment and feedback. Vague targets produce vague self-monitoring.

Targets Are Derived From, Not Identical To, Standards

Standards describe what students should know and be able to do across a grade level or course. A single standard may encompass weeks of instruction and generate dozens of daily targets. Teachers who paste the standard text onto the board and call it a learning target have not done the translation work. The target should represent today's learning, not the full arc of a multi-week outcome.

Success Criteria Must Accompany the Target

A learning target without success criteria is incomplete. Success criteria describe what it looks like when a student has met the target, the observable indicators of mastery. For a target like "I can write a thesis statement that makes an arguable claim," the success criteria might include: it takes a position (not a fact), it is specific enough to be contested, and it previews the structure of the argument. Together, target and criteria give students a complete picture of the destination and the route.

Classroom Application

Elementary: Reading Comprehension

A third-grade teacher preparing a lesson on story structure might post: "I can identify the problem and solution in a story and explain how the problem changes the characters." Before reading begins, the teacher briefly unpacks each part of the target with students, models what "identifying" looks like using a familiar story, and defines what counts as a strong explanation. During the lesson, she periodically pauses to ask students: "Where are we in the target? Can you identify the problem yet? How do you know?" The target becomes the organizing thread of the lesson, not a decoration on the wall.

Middle School: Science

An eighth-grade science teacher frames a lab lesson with: "I can predict how changing the concentration of a solution affects the rate of osmosis." Students record the target in their lab notebooks alongside their hypothesis. After the lab, rather than a generic reflection, students write specifically to the target: "I predicted X. My data showed Y. Here is what that tells me about concentration and osmosis." The target anchors both the inquiry and the evidence-based writing that follows.

High School: History

A tenth-grade history teacher working on a primary source analysis lesson posts: "I can identify one way the author's perspective shapes what they include or leave out of a document." She pairs the target with two success criteria written on the board: (1) I name a specific detail from the document as evidence, and (2) I connect that detail to something I know about the author's position or background. Students use these criteria to evaluate their own written responses before sharing with a partner. This self-referential check is only possible because students have a specific standard against which to measure themselves.

Research Evidence

Rick Stiggins and Jan Chappuis' work across the 1990s and 2000s established that students who are clear on learning targets outperform peers on both teacher-made assessments and standardized tests. Their synthesis, Classroom Assessment for Student Learning (Stiggins, Chappuis, Chappuis, & Arter, 2004), drew on a decade of professional development data showing that teachers who consistently communicate targets and success criteria see measurable gains within a single school year.

Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black's "Inside the Black Box" (1998) reviewed 250 studies and concluded that formative assessment practices — including sharing learning intentions clearly, produce effect sizes between 0.4 and 0.7 standard deviations. At the classroom level, this represents roughly one to two years of additional learning growth. Learning targets are one of the primary mechanisms through which this effect operates, because they make formative assessment self-referential rather than purely teacher-driven.

Hattie and Timperley's 2007 review "The Power of Feedback" in Review of Educational Research found that feedback is most effective when it addresses the gap between current performance and a known goal. Without a clear target, feedback becomes generic praise or criticism rather than actionable information. The implication is structural: the target must exist and be understood before feedback can do its work.

A limitation worth naming: most research on learning targets conflates several related practices (posting goals, sharing criteria, discussing targets verbally) and rarely isolates the effect of the target alone. The effect sizes are strong, but the active ingredient within the cluster of practices is not always clearly separable. Teachers should treat the full package, target plus success criteria plus reference throughout the lesson, rather than assuming a posted "I can" statement alone drives outcomes.

Common Misconceptions

Misconception 1: A learning target is the same as a lesson topic or agenda item.

Writing "Fractions" or "The Civil War" on the board is not a learning target. Topics describe content areas; targets describe what students will do with that content. The difference matters because a topic tells students nothing about what success looks like or how to direct their attention. Every learning target should contain a verb that describes a cognitive or physical action (explain, compare, construct, evaluate, demonstrate), not just a noun that names a subject.

Misconception 2: Learning targets constrain teacher flexibility and spontaneous learning.

Some teachers resist targets because they fear being locked into a narrow script. A learning target does not prevent a lesson from evolving; it provides a reference point for productive detours. If a student raises a question that takes the class in an unexpected direction, the teacher can say, "That's worth exploring — let's check at the end whether it connected to our target or whether we need to plan a separate lesson for it." Targets support metacognition without eliminating responsiveness.

Misconception 3: Sharing the target at the end of the lesson ("now you know why we did that") is equivalent to sharing it at the start.

Revealing a target after instruction is a summary, not a tool for learning. Students need the target before they engage with the content so they can make decisions about where to focus, what questions to ask, and how to self-monitor. A retrospective reveal may feel satisfying as a closure move, but it forfeits the self-regulation benefits that make learning targets worth using.

Connection to Active Learning

Learning targets are particularly powerful within active learning structures because they shift self-assessment from a teacher-mediated event to a student-initiated habit. When students know the target, they can evaluate their own thinking during pair work, group discussion, or inquiry tasks without waiting for the teacher to tell them whether they are on track.

In a Socratic seminar, for example, a target like "I can use textual evidence to challenge or support a peer's claim" gives students a concrete lens for peer listening. Rather than speaking to impress the teacher, students orient toward a shared intellectual goal they can see.

In project-based learning, milestones that correspond to specific learning targets allow students to self-pace and seek help at precise points of confusion rather than at a generalized sense of being lost. The project becomes a vehicle for a known set of targets, not an open-ended activity with uncertain learning outcomes.

The relationship between targets and teacher clarity is direct: clarity research consistently finds that when students understand what they are learning, why it matters, and what success looks like, engagement and achievement both rise. Learning targets are the primary instrument through which that clarity is operationalized in daily instruction.

For deeper grounding in how targets connect to ongoing assessment practice, see formative assessment and learning objectives.

Sources

Stiggins, R., Chappuis, J., Chappuis, S., & Arter, J. (2004). Classroom Assessment for Student Learning: Doing It Right — Using It Well. Assessment Training Institute.
Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi Delta Kappan, 80(2), 139–148.
Hattie, J. (2009). Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. Routledge.
Chappuis, J. (2015). Seven Strategies of Assessment for Learning (2nd ed.). Pearson.

Learning Targets vs. Learning Objectives