5-point-checklist for goal formulation

The following five points represent general premises you should consider when formulating or assessing goals for your project or program (adapted from Patton, 1997):

1. Goals and measures should be clearly separated. Measures or services (such as developing a course or making available information) are frequently named as goals. But these “activity goals” or “HOWgoals” should not stand alone, they should be linked to “outcome goals”, i.e. to what should finally be achieved by the measures (see Page: logic models).

2. Goals and indicators should be clearly separated. Indicators show whether a specific matter which cannot be directly observed exists or has occurred. However, indicators (such as the test score in a mathematics test) never fully capture the matter of interest (in this case: mathematical skills). It should be possible to define indicators for each goal (see also the "M" in S.M.A.R.T. objectives), but goals are not identical to indicators or measured values.

3. Goals should relate to the most important project or program results. The point is not to develop the longest possible list of goals, but to focus the goal specifications on the results that are really important. It may be helpful to weight the goals and set priorities.

4. Goals should be meaningful. In principle, it should also be possible to fail to meet a goal that has been set. If, say, a one-week course on the subject XY “is designed to heighten the students' awareness of subject XY”, this goal means little, because it will be virtually impossible not to achieve this goal.

5. Goals should be comprehensible. It should be quickly clear what a project or program is about. Hence, goals should be precisely formulated, complicated sentence structures should be avoided, and only one topic should be addressed by each goal.