Vocational Verbs

Moving Beyond Bloom’s

While Bloom’s taxonomy is useful for identifying levels of learning, many of the verbs included in the framework are quite general and may not accurately represent the field specific learning activities of your program or course. With that in mind, it may be helpful to consider verbs that are more relevant to your specific division or field when refining or constructing learning outcomes and objectives.

For example, instructors in the School of Culinary Arts are more likely to integrate outcomes with verbs that include; knead, mix, measure, bake or distil, ferment, bottle. And, a nursing student will most likely be reading a course outline that contains course objectives with verbs that include: bandage, wrap, administer, apply, empathize.

To refine or identify field-specific verbs, you might consider reviewing course outlines from pre-requisite or co-requisite courses in your program with the Course Outline Look-up database in the NC website. Conversations with colleagues, course leads or educational developers from the CAE are all resource people available to assist.