5-point-checklist

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 separate. Measures or services (such as developing a course or making available some information) are frequently named as goals. But these "activity goals" or "HOW-goals" should not stand alone, rather they should be linked to "outcome goals", i.e. to what should be ultimately achieved by the measures (see Logic models page). 

2. Goals and indicators should be clearly separate. 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 outcomes. The point is not to develop the longest possible list of goals, but more to focus the goal specifications on the outcomes 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 of XY "is designed to sharpen the students' awareness on the subject of XY", this goal means little, because it is virtually impossible not to achieve this goal.

5. Goals should be comprehensible. It should be 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.