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Week 2: The ABCD Learning Objectives Framework and Effective Web Searching

In this module, our class learned about two distinct concepts: ABCD learning objectives and Web searching, both of which are of great value to my teaching and learning.

With regard to the former, the four letters A, B, C, D stand for Audience, Behavior, Condition, and Degree, respectively. To write learning objectives following the ABCD framework, teachers need to answer four questions corresponding to the above components, including “Who is the objective written for?”, “What action or behavior should be demonstrated by the learner?”, “Under what circumstances or conditions will the behavior be performed?”, and “To what level of proficiency or standard is the behavior expected to be performed?”. Personally, I hold that the ABCD model is crucial for writing clear and specific learning objectives that are both observable and measurable. Ambiguous action verbs such as “understand” and “learn” are thus unacceptable and should be avoided in this model. However, writing an accurate ABCD objective is not easy. Since it was my first time trying this model, I felt extremely confused and encountered many difficulties. Thanks to support from my peers and feedback from the lecturer during the Zoom session, I was eventually able to write the first ABCD learning objective for my own class, i.e. “Given a pair of sentences having repeated information (Condition), the 9th grade students (Audience) will be able to write a new sentence similar in meaning to the original pair, using a relative clause (Behavior) with 100% accuracy (Degree).”

As for Web searching, our class had a discussion about this topic on Canvas, our online learning platform. Looking through my friends’ responses, I was truly amazed at the variety of search engines they used, most of which I had never heard of before. Normally, Google Scholar and ResearchGate are my preferred tools when searching for academic literature, as they offer a vast collection of high-quality research papers that can greatly assist me in my essays and presentations. In the future, I would like to try some other tools suggested by my classmates, such as SlideShare and Microsoft Bing. While SlideShare is advantageous to get a quick understanding of complex topics thanks to its concise and visually appealing presentations, Microsoft Bing can be used as an alternative to Google. Apart from that, we also shared about search sites for ELT materials, of which I found BusyTeacher, mentioned by Ms. Nhung Nguyen, to be the most interesting. This website offers nearly 18,000 free printable worksheets and lesson plans for teaching English to students at all levels, with no registration required to download.

In conclusion, this module not only helped me learn more about search engines for both learning and teaching purposes but also introduced a new framework for writing learning objectives more effectively. In upcoming lessons, I will definitely apply the ABCD model to write appropriate objectives for my students, and also try new search sites based on my friends’ recommendations to provide them with more engaging and useful materials.
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