A Pragmatic Master List of Action Verbs for Bloom's Taxonomy

Abstract

Bloom's Taxonomy is an approach to organizing learning that was first published in 1956. It is ubiquitous in UK Higher Education (HE), where Universities use it as the basis for teaching and assessment; Learning Outcomes are created using suggested verbs for each tier of the taxonomy, and these are then "constructively aligned" to assessments. We conducted an analysis to determine whether there is consensus regarding the presentation of Bloom's Taxonomy across UK HE. Forty seven publicly available verb lists were collected from 35 universities and textbooks. There was very little agreement between these lists, most of which were not supported by evidence explaining where the verbs came from. We were able to construct a pragmatic "master list" of action verbs by using a simple majority consensus method. We were also able to construct a master list of commonly recommended "verbs to avoid." These master lists should be useful for anyone tasked with using Bloom's Taxonomy to write Learning Outcomes for assessment. However, our findings raise broader questions about the evidence base which underpins a common approach to teaching and assessment in UK HE and education generally.

The Importance of School World Atlases According to Czech Geography Teachers

“…The verbs that teachers used in their answers were used as action verbs and assigned to Bloom's taxonomy categories. The assignment was completed according to the Pragmatic Master List of Action Verbs provided by Newton et al [27]. It is evident from the graph in Figure 8 that most tasks (67%) were focused on finding elements in maps (knowledge).…”

Transparency of cognitive complexity in performance assessments: A validity study

“…Bloom's taxonomy is a method for categorizing the levels of reasoning skills required in a task (Bloom, 1956; Newton et al., 2020). It consists of a hierarchical and incrementally achieved six levels of cognition or cognitive ability: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation (Webb, 1997; 2006).…”

“…Bloom's and Webb's DOK taxonomies are generally more prevalent in education and assessment and emphasize the importance of action verbs as contributing to the clarity in rubrics and measurability of learning outcomes (Hess, 2011; Newton et al., 2020) and, therefore, represent an appropriate set of models for informing the difficulty of assessment tasks. Indeed, researchers and educators have used taxonomies such as Bloom's when outlining course and lesson objectives (Anderson et al., 2001) as well as test specifications and constructing assessments for certification to help ensure that higher order skills are represented in assessment scores and to enhance the authenticity of assessments (Cizek et al., 1993).…”

“…Bloom's taxonomy is a method for categorizing the levels of reasoning skills required in a task (Bloom, 1956;Newton et al, 2020).…”

“…For example, level one of the DOK and Bloom is approximately the same (recall, recognition). Prior research has also shown that the entire range of DOK levels of complexity can be seen in each of Bloom's levels (Oosterhof et al, 2008). However, it is worth noting that part of the overlap between the two taxonomies is due to the fact that some action verbs can be classified at different levels depending on the context of the task prompt and complexity of action.…”