All in the Verbs
At work, I've started to be involved in developing a process for program design. I am particularly interested in thinking through the tools, techniques, and approaches that make for genuinely good learning experience design. A central piece of that work are the learning outcomes: what students are doing across the program and within each individual course. This is a real opportunity to expand constructive alignment beyond a box-ticking exercise and to use it more as a strategic approach to clearly thread multiple components of the broader student experience through an entire program, scaffolded across courses.
When I started this, I didn't want to just continue with the formulaic approach to program learning outcomes. A critical part of that approach are the verbs, and as I mentioned in my last post, the current approach to learning outcomes and verb selection are structured around Bloom's cognitive dimension alone. The reality is that other dimensions exist — they just haven't been developed with the same rigour or consistency. In that last post, I started sketching those other dimensions out further. Building on existing work, but bringing a more structured and nuanced approach – making sure there are equivalent levels across each dimension, and starting to think through what is distinctive about each level and each domain.
When it comes to actually writing outcomes, though, it always comes back to the verbs. So one of the things I've been most keen to develop is a comprehensive verb list that works across all three domains — cognitive, affective, and operative — at each of the six levels.
Doing this work has been genuinely interesting. I already had a collection of verb lists I'd used as tools in previous projects, so part of the task was to consolidate them, but I also looked more broadly at what others have done, and tried to synthesise it into a coherent suite of verbs that sits consistently across the levels.
One of the more interesting realisations along the way was that some verbs are genuinely shared across dimensions. Take identify — cognitively, you might identify a pattern; affectively, you might identify the emotions present in a situation; operatively, you might identify what movements are being made in a physical space. The verb holds across all three. But at the same time, some verbs clearly belong more naturally within a specific dimension. And there's a sequencing dimension too: a verb that's standard practice within one domain at an early level might become a shared, cross-domain expectation at a higher level.
What I'm really trying to achieve is a more three-dimensional version of Bloom's. Learning has height, breadth, and width – but the affective and operative components have often been lost. These are often dismissed as "soft skills" or treated as trade-specific concerns, but they matter deeply in higher education. Higher education that includes vocational training and degrees in which cognitive, affective, and operative development are genuinely intertwined. Think about social work or nursing: those programs aren't just about building knowledge. The affective dimension, how you engage with patients and clients, and the operative dimension, how you hold yourself, how you carry out specific procedures, are core to what it means to be competent in those fields. We need to be capturing that, but also extending our thinking beyond cognitive and what students know, to what they can do and who they can be.
So, here's the verb list. I'm still working through how best to share these kinds of resources, but for now this feels like the right move — put it out there and see what people do with it. If you already have a verb list you work from, there might be things here worth adopting. Keen to hear your feedback.
| Shared Applies across all domains |
Cognitive Thinking · Knowing · Reasoning |
Affective Feeling · Valuing · Relating |
Operative Doing · Making · Performing |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Awareness The learner notices, attends and begins to name – inwardly, emotionally and sensorially. |
identify, label, listen, locate, name, notice, observe, recognise, recall, recite, record, reproduce, retrieve, select, visualise |
Remembering choose, copy, define, describe, duplicate, enumerate, list, match, memorise, quote, state, tabulate, tell |
Receiving attend, acknowledge, aware, concern, experience, follow, open, receive, respect, tolerate, welcome, withhold |
Perceiving align, detect, focus, hear, orient, perceive, position, sense, track, tune |
| Concepts The learner begins to make meaning – interpreting information, reacting to experience, and readying for action. |
associate, clarify, classify, describe, discuss, explain, group, illustrate, indicate, interpret, match, outline, paraphrase, reconstruct, relate, report, represent, research, restate, roleplay, show, summarise |
Understanding cite, convert, estimate, extend, generalise, infer, judge, order, reason, rephrase, rewrite, trace, transform |
Responding ask, attribute, comply, engage, express, explore, hear, participate, practice, question, react, reply, respond, share, wonder |
Preparing approximate, attempt, calibrate, check, copy, distinguish, exhibit, follow, handle, hold, imitate, mimic, prepare, replicate, try |
| Patterns The learner puts knowledge and skill to work – applying procedures, committing to values, and reproducing actions with growing confidence. |
act, administer, annotate, apply, build, carry, chart, collect, complete, construct, demonstrate, discern, document, employ, execute, experiment, interview, introduce, map, manipulate, operate, organise, paint, plan, practise, produce, quantify, sketch, teach, translate, troubleshoot, use, utilise |
Applying adapt, articulate, calculate, determine, establish, exemplify, predict, prepare, schedule, solve, transfer, write |
Valuing accept, adopt, appreciate, commit, connect, defend, dramatise, empathise, invest, justify, prioritise, seek, simulate, value |
Imitating adjust, assemble, differentiate, form, make, measure, monitor, perform, practice, refine, rehearse, repeat, replicate, sequence, simulate, time |
| Practices The learner examines structure and relationships – breaking things apart, ordering values, and developing consistent practice |
analyse, categorise, connect, contrast, cooperate, correlate, corroborate, debrief, deduce, diagram, differentiate, discriminate, dissect, distinguish, divide, devise, engineer, examine, focus, implement, infer, inspect, investigate, manage, order, perform, prioritise, propose, question, reason, reflect, separate, storyboard, survey, test |
Analysing appraise, break down, compute, conceptualise, deconstruct, debate, deliberate, estimate, inquire, simplify, subdivide |
Organising address, advise, arrange, balance, broker, challenge, conduct, contribute, elicit, encourage, facilitate, initiate, integrate, mediate, navigate, negotiate, read, reconcile, resolve, weigh |
Practising adapt, adopt, address, attribute, combine, coordinate, customise, develop, exemplify, incorporate, modify, sustain, systematise |
| Principles The learner applies criteria and judgment — assessing quality, living consistently by values, and executing with fluent mastery |
appraise, argue, assess, compare, conclude, consult, contextualise, convince, critique, decide, decode, deconstruct, defend, derive, determine, dispute, estimate, evaluate, extrapolate, forecast, guide, interrogate, judge, justify, measure, persuade, predict, prescribe, present, qualify, recommend, refine, resolve, review, support, verify, weigh |
Evaluating authenticate, consider, criticise, cross-examine, disprove, grade, hypothesise, influence, perceive, prove, rank, rate, reframe, score, substantiate, validate |
Characterising advocate, behave, campaign, embody, exemplify, exhibit, foster, model, modify, promote, resist, uphold, urge |
Performing coach, conduct, direct, express, extend, fashion, improvise, integrate, master, mentor, oversee, supervise |
| Expression The learner generates something new – original thought, authentic voice, and novel technique – that reaches outward into the world |
abstract, adapt, arrange, author, challenge, collaborate, combine, commentate, compose, create, design, develop, diagnose, elaborate, facilitate, formulate, generate, imagine, innovate, integrate, invent, improve, instruct, intervene, make, model, modify, negotiate, optimise, originate, prepare, provoke, rationalise, revise, simulate, solve, strategise, structure, theorise, validate |
Creating anticipate, assemble, compile, conceive, distil, express, posit, postulate, rearrange, reorganise, report, speculate, substitute |
Advocating advance, arbitrate, champion, cultivate, effect, enable, engender, further, govern, influence, inspire, lead, motivate, pioneer, press, regulate, shape, steer, steward, transform |
Originating choreograph, contribute, curate, fabricate, lead, manufacture, pilot, pioneer, redefine, synthesise, teach, train |
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