Learning For Professional Performance

Leading Edge Learning

Bloom’s revised taxonomy

Create
Focus: Can students generate new ideas, products, or ways of viewing things?
Use: Design, generate, construct, plan, produce, invent, assemble, formulate,
develop … etc.

Evaluate
Focus: Can students justify a decision or course of action?
Use: Check, hypothesise, critique, experiment, judge, discuss, defend, evaluate,
select, argue … etc.

Analyse
Focus: Can students differentiate between constituent parts to explore?
understandings and relationships
Use: Compare, organise, deconstruct, contrast, classify, differentiate, examine,
interrogate, experiment … etc.

Apply
Focus: Can students use new knowledge in new ways or in different situations?
Use: Implement, choose, demonstrate, carry out, use, execute, teach, illustrate,
operate, interpret … etc.

Understand
Focus: Can students explain ideas or concepts?
Use: Interpret, infer, compare, summarise, paraphrase, classify, explain, describe,
select, identify … etc.

Remember
Focus: Can students recall information?
Use: Recognise, list, recall, retrieve, name, define … etc.

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Leading Edge Learning

This new expanded taxonomy can help education designers and educators write and
revise performance based learning outcomes. Bloom's six major categories were
changed from noun to performance focused verb forms.
The new terms (from lowest to highest level of complexity) are defined as:

Retrieving, recognizing, and recalling relevant

Remembering
knowledge from long-term memory.
Constructing meaning from oral, written, and graphic
messages through interpreting, exemplifying,
Understanding
classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing,
and explaining.
Carrying out or using a procedure through
Applying
executing, or implementing.
Breaking material into constituent parts, determining
how the parts relate to one another and to an overall
Analyzing
structure or purpose through differentiating,
organizing, and attributing.
Making judgments based on criteria and standards
Evaluating
through checking and critiquing.
Putting elements together to form a coherent or
functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new
Creating
pattern or structure through generating, planning,
or producing.

Because the purpose of writing learning outcomes is to define what the teacher
wants the student to do, using learning outcomes will help students to better
understand the purpose of each activity by clarifying the results to be achieved.
Verbs such as "know", "appreciate", "internalize", “understand”, and "value" do not
define an explicit performance to be carried out by the learner.

Table 1: Examples of unclear and performance-based outcomes.

Unclear Outcomes Revised Outcomes

Students will know how to calculate …. Students will be able to calculate …

Students will understand the relevant Students will distinguish between

and irrelevant numbers in a relevant and irrelevant numbers in a
mathematical word problem. mathematical word problem.

Students will appreciate the best way to Students will compare and evaluate the
solve the word problem. two methods and identify the method
best suited to solve the word problem.

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 Learning For Professional Performance
Leading Edge Learning

The development of performance-based outcomes in Higher Education1

There are fundamental conceptual differences between performance or outcome-led
designs and the traditional university approach which emphasises input and process.
The challenge to designers of curricula in higher education is to harness the use of
learning outcomes to view learning from the perspective of the learner, rather than
the lecturer, and thereby to enrich the quality of learning experienced by
undergraduate students. The process of defining and expressing learning outcomes
enables lecturers to reflect upon what they intend their students to learn and
thereby see more clearly the relationship between what they teach (the ’syllabus’)
and what students do, in fact, learn.
This presupposes that the learning outcomes are clearly expressed, in a form which
enables learners to know at the commencement of a course, subject, or lesson,
what it is they are expected to achieve in relation to subject content.
The important point is that the more learning outcomes are clearly expressed, the
more learners are able to concentrate on what they need to know in order to
succeed in a given subject, course or lesson. This places a greater emphasis on the
specification of assessment tasks and the criteria by which judgements will be
made. This forces both students and teachers to focus on the relationship between
learning outcomes, assessment and the experience of learning.
At the same time it is important not to be overly narrow in the way outcomes are
specified. First, there is no assumption that the outcomes derive only from either
the teaching objectives or the course content. This is to emphasise the role of
students in accepting responsibility for their own learning. Second, the demand for
crisp, unambiguous, objective measurement of learning achievement was heavily
criticised by Eisner who complained about the misguided Behaviourist
'preoccupation with standardised outcomes' (1979, p. 15) which dominated
education in the 1960s and 1970s. This resulted in atomised learning in which
performance focused on minute actions – which ignored their wider context.
While outcomes help clarify learning goals, lecturers in higher education will
continue to make judgments about, for example, their students' ability to argue
cogently, to analyse material and to interpret data. None of these is subject to
absolute standards, yet all are assessable against a set of criteria.
The abandonment of the descriptor 'behavioural' is absolutely crucial because such a
narrow approach is unsuitable for further and higher education. At the same time,
assessment and assessment criteria remain at the core of curricula designed in
learning outcome form.

References
Allan, J., Bottley, J., Green, P., Jennings, S., Penfold, B., Somervell, H. & Wanklyn,
M. (1994) Record of Achievement Project. Wolverhampton:University of
Wolverhampton.
Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (Eds.). (2001). A taxonomy for learning,
teaching and assessing: A revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of educational
outcomes: Complete edition, New York: Longman.
Eisner, E. (1979) The Educational Imagination (New York, Macmillan).

1
Adapted from Allan, J. (1996) Learning Outcomes in Higher Education. Studies in Higher Education
21:1, 93-108

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