What are my expectations?

I thought yesterday's class session would be a good time to check on the amount of pre-class work that the students put in to the pre-readings and pre-class homework, and to check on what kinds of notes they were taking (or planning to take) in class and what kind of processing they were expecting to do after class.

Now, these are graduate students, so they spent between 1.5 and 6(!) times more time than I expected on the pre-class work, with an average of about a factor of 4 more time than I thought. After significant amounts of discussion when we didn't quite talk the same language, it became clear that they didn't know what my expectations were for what/how much they should know.

Before term, I spent a lot of time (between 1.5 and 6 times more time than I should have?) on trying to be explicit with learning outcomes, and I thought being clear about what I wanted the students to be able to, and to know, on finishing this class. *And* I put sample oral exam final questions on the learning outcomes too, to give a sense of the kind of question that I wanted the students to be able to answer well. So all I needed to do was refer to that, right?

Very wrong. I realized that in a quest to make the learning outcomes and sample questions "rich", they were too vague and open-ended, and could be interpreted in almost any way; there were no reliable signals to the students about the level of knowledge/understanding/skills I wanted them to develop. Oops.

What was interesting after that was our collective struggle to figure out a way out of this mess. We had a jigsaw-format discussion (individuals listing the properties of spirals/ellipticals separately, separate spiral/elliptical groups discussing the properties of those galaxies separately, then splitting into spiral/elliptical mixed pairs to compare and contrast the properties of spirals and ellipticals, then a whole-class summary of that activity), where I tried to convey that the pre-reading is meant to give them the preparation they need for that kind of activity, but shouldn't be more in-depth than that. We also decided that they'd send their notes (or a summary of yesterday's main points) to me as part of the pre-class work for tomorrow. So we have a plan, at least...

What I'm curious about is if anyone has experience of how to communicate clearly and early performance expectations without it turning into something ridiculously fine-grained and micro-scale.