[This is the the seventh in a series of posts about learning objectives. We’ve now compiled all the posts into a single downloadable guide to writing learning objectives if you want to check that out.]
As we mentioned in an earlier post, Bloom believed there are three different kinds of learning: learning about things you can “know,” learning about things you can “do,” and learning about things you “feel.” We will refer to these as knowledge, skills, and attitudes, or “KSAs” for short.
In this post, we’re going to consider the “skills” domain more closely, looking at six different levels of skill. The information below is based on the theories of R.H. Dave (1975), and draws from explanations of those theories that appear at Don Clark’s well-known “Big Dog Little Dog” instructional design blog. Check out Clark’s material on learning domains to read more about this hierarchy and to learn about alternate versions of this hierarchy by Simpson and Harrow if you’re interested. I’ve written about Dave’s hierarchy because it’s the one that seems most useful to me, but the others are also popular, well-known, and well-regarded.
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Dave includes five different levels of skill, from the most basic to the most advanced. We’ll list and explain each below, and we’ll give a list of behaviors that learners must perform to show they’ve mastered a skill at each level. This will help you pick the verb you’ll use when writing learning objectives dealing with skills.
Dave’s five levels of “skill” represent not so much different kinds of skills but rather different degrees of competence in performing a skill. The five levels, in order from most basic to most advanced, are:
The levels of the skills domain are often represented as different levels of a pyramid, with imitation, the simplest level, making up the bottom of the pyramid and naturalization, the most complex level, making up the top.
Now, let’s apply what we just discussed to the best way to write a “skills” learning objective. You probably remember that when you write a learning objective, one part of the objective describes a behavior the learner must perform, and this behavior is expressed as a verb. So, we can make it easier to write a learning objective by coming up with a collection of verbs that describe behaviors in each level of the skills taxonomy above. Check out the list below to get some ideas.
To see a longer list of skills-related verbs for your learning objectives, click here.
Keep these different levels of the “skills” in mind, and the verbs to use when writing learning objectives for each level, and you’ll not only create better learning objectives, you’ll create better training materials too.
You might also find any of these other articles learning objectives helpful:
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