The sharing of explicit learning objectives and/or learning outcomes is considered to be good practice in schools with OFSTED observation criteria indicating that this is a pre-requisite to a good or outstanding lesson. Such practice does not appear to be widespread in chemistry teaching at HE level. Whilst a statement of aims/objectives/outcomes can normally be found in the documentation accompanying any given unit of teaching these are typically in a less student-friendly format than those used in school or are too vague to be useful. At the same time many lecturers do communicate aims at the start of a lecture but there may be scope for doing this in a more effective way. The extent to which students are exposed to „learning outcomes‟ varies greatly from institution to institution discipline to discipline and from teacher to teacher and as such it is difficult to discern the best approach.
