Visualising Outcomes: domains, taxonomies and verbs

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NOTE: updated high-quality visualisations of these taxonomies are available here.

I think being able to visualise things is important. Faculty and learning designers need to be able to see Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) take shape, and many find existing lists uninspiring. It’s not uncommon for faculty and instructional designers to grow weary of ILOs; they can feel restrictive, repetitive, formulaic, and sometimes obstructive. In previous posts, I’ve tried to suggest that the bigger picture, the challenges of effective 21st-century university-level learning design, make them not only useful but also essential. If you don’t agree, don’t bother reading. I’m not going to try to persuade you. If you think there’s some truth in the argument and you want to engage with ILOs to make your teaching more focused, your students increasingly autonomous, and your graduates equipped with meaningful evidence, then I hope I have something worthwhile to share and look forward to your thoughts.

My argument is that a module (a substantial unit of a full year’s undergraduate study), and the programme of which it is part, should have clearly articulated outcomes in four domains:

• Knowledge and understanding – or the knowledge domain
• Intellectual Skills – or the cognitive domain
• Professional Skills – or the affective domain
• Transferable Skills – or the psychomotor domain

I’m suggesting that one SHOULD expect to see a different distribution of ILOs across the outcomes in these domains, depending on the module’s focus and the level of study. One might expect to see a second-year anthropology module on ‘theoretical perspectives’, emphasising cognitive outcomes, and a module being studied alongside it on ‘research design and techniques’, emphasising affective and psychomotor outcomes. One might reasonably expect to see more foundational ‘knowledge and understanding’ outcomes in the first year of a programme of study, and more ‘cognitive’ outcomes at the end of the programme. The lack of this ‘designed articulation’ in many modules undermines their value to the student and ultimately to the faculty.

The basic principle is that an outcome should be assessable. Lots of great stuff can happen in your teaching and students’ learning that DOESN’T need to be assessed. It can be articulated in the syllabus, it just isn’t a measured outcome. A student should be able, at the end of this course of study (module or programme), to evidence that they have attained the intended learning outcomes. This evidence has been assessed in some way, and the student can then point to the ILOs amassed throughout their programme and say, “I can demonstrate that I learnt to DO this”.

Representing Taxonomies

There has been a significant shift in the language we use from the original work by Bloom and colleagues in the 1950s. The passively descriptive language of Bloom’s Taxonomy has become the active language of Anderson and Krathwohl (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). The taxonomies have moved from Evaluation to Evaluate, from Analysis to Analyse. This is significant because the emphasis has shifted from describing the focus of the teaching to the demonstrable outcomes of the learning.

The illustration above consists of four visual ‘wheels’ that I have used to discuss learning outcomes with faculty in the context of module and programme design at Massey University in New Zealand and at the LSE and BPP University College in the United Kingdom. These visual representations were inspired by work done elsewhere, particularly in the cognitive domain. The first documented example of this circular representation I have been able to find is attributed to Barbara Clark in 2002, but a great many people have since represented Bloom’s original and the revised cognitive domain in this way.

The circular representation has the higher level terms at the centre, proto-verbs if you will, surrounded by a series of active verbs that articulate actions an individual might undertake to generate evidence of their ability to represent a proto-verb. The circular visualisation also creates a more fluid representation of the stages or divisions in the proto-verbs. Rather than a strict ‘step-by-step’ representation where one advances ‘up’ the proto-verbs, one might consider this almost like the dial on an old telephone; in every case, one starts at the ‘foundational’ and dials up through the stages to the ‘highest’ level. Each level relies on the previous. It may be implicit that to analyse something, one will already have acquired a sense of its application, and that application is grounded on subject knowledge and understanding. So the circle is a useful way of visualising the interconnected nature of the process. Most importantly, in my practice, it’s a great catalyst for debate.

The circular representations of the domains and their associated taxonomies also help make learning designers aware of the language they use. Can a verb be used at different levels? Certainly. Why? Because context is everything. One might ‘identify’ different rock samples in a first-year geology class as part of applying a given classification of rocks to samples, or one might identify a new species of insect as part of a postgraduate research programme. The verb on its own does not always denote level. I talk about the structure of ILOs in a subsequent post.

More recent representations have created new complex forms that include the outer circle illustrated here. I’ve found these rather useful, in part because they often prove contentious. If the inner circle represents (in my versions) the proto-verbs within our chosen taxonomies, and the next circle represent that active verbs used to describe the Intended Learning Outcomes (ILO) AND the Learning and Teaching Activities (TLS), the outermost circle represents the evidence and assessment forms used to demonstrate that verb. Increasingly, I’ve used this to identify educational technologies and to get faculty thinking more broadly about how they can assess online and in more traditional settings. The outermost circle will continue to evolve as our use of educational technologies evolves. In Constructive Alignment, one might reasonably expect students’ learning activities to ‘rehearse’ the skills they are ultimately to evidence in assessment (Biggs & Collis, 1982; Boud & Falchikov, 2006), and the forms that enable this are becoming increasingly varied.

Re-visioning  Taxonomies

One of my favourite representations of the relationship between the knowledge dimension and the cognitive domain is from Rex Heer at Iowa State University’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (http://www.celt.iastate.edu/teaching/RevisedBlooms1.html accessed ). It’s an interactive model that articulates the relationship, as Anderson and Krathwohl saw it, rather well. My own interest, as we look to effective ILOs, is to separate the knowledge dimension as a subject or knowledge domain and have faculty articulate this clearly for students, before reconnecting to the other domains. A process I’ll talk about subsequently.

Here are my four ‘working circles’ using adaptations of taxonomies from Anderson and Krathwohl (Knowledge and Understanding and Cognitive), Krathwohl et al. (Affective), and Dave (Psychomotor). I have adapted the Knowledge Dimension of Anderson and Krathwohl to do two things: to describe the dimension in terms of active verbs rather than as a definition of the nature of the knowledge itself, and I have incorporated a stage, I believe, that is underrepresented in their articulation. I have added the ability to ‘ contextualise’ subject knowledge between the ability to specify it (Factual) and the ability to conceptualise (Conceptual). I have also rearticulated the original ‘Metacognitive’ as the ability to ‘Abstract’. This will doubtless need further work. My intent is not to dismiss the valuable work already in evidence around the relationship between a knowledge dimension and the cognitive domain; it is to enable faculty, specifically when writing learning outcomes, to identify the subject, discipline, or knowledge to be enabled in more meaningful ways.

I hope these provoke thought, reflection and comment. Feel free to use them with colleagues in discussion, and let me know if there are enhancements you think would make them more useful to others.

Cognitive Domain – Intellectual Skills

Affective Domain – Professional and Personal Skills

Psychomotor Domain- Practical, Technical and Transferable Skills

Knowledge Domain – Subject and Discipline Knowledge

The next post will illustrate the usefulness of these visualisations for drafting Intended Learning Outcomes, with examples.

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Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing : a revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Longman.

Biggs, J. B., & Collis, K. F. (1982). Evaluating the Quality of Learning: Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome Taxonomy. Academic Press Inc.

Boud, D., & Falchikov, N. (2006). Aligning assessment with long‐term learning. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 31(4), 399–413.

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Edited October 19th 2012 in response to feedback.