In my role as the Neuroscience Honours convenor, I engage with academics that teach the Honours students research techniques in a workshop format as part of the students’ coursework. About a third of the academics are in research-only roles with limited teaching experience into undergraduate courses.

In 2022, when I took over the convenor role, I worked with these academics to develop effective, achievable, and relevant learning objectives for their workshops. This included introducing Bloom’s taxonomy, discussing the purpose of learning objectives and the impacts on student learning.

Unsolicited feedback showed that ‘the academics were highly appreciative for the support and guidance’ (emails from academics), and students said that ‘having clear learning objectives helped them focus on their studies’ (unsolicited oral feedback).

In 2023, I revisited the learning objectives with the academics and helped further improve them based on changes they had made to their workshop.