Several decades ago, Benjamin Bloom led a group of educational researchers on a project to improve higher education exams and methods for evaluating their results.
They came up with a taxonomy, or classification system, for organizing cognitive tasks and instructional objectives. Their original work classified objectives into three domains: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. The cognitive, or thinking, domain has had the greatest impact on the teaching craft, and continues to give educators a reference for creating and evaluating learning objectives.
A slightly updated version of Bloom’s Taxonomy, developed by a group led by one of Bloom’s students, is used here.
- Remembering
- Understanding
- Applying
- Analyzing
- Evaluating
- Creating
Lower Order Thinking Provides the Foundation for Student Learning
Remembering, The least cognitively-challenging type of thinking, is a foundational-level function. Tasks include listing, describing, repeating, identifying, and recognizing. Comprehension, or understanding, refers to constructing meaning from material. Objectives could include the verbs: interpret, summarize, compare, and explain.
After learners understand , they can begin to acquire the ability to apply newly-understood material to concrete situations. Ways that learners can apply are by organizing, demonstrating, calculating, illustrating, and relating. This is different from creating something because learners are applying new learning in isolated, abstract situations.
Higher Order Thinking Challenges Learners' Cognitive Skills
The fourth cognitive classification is analyzing. After foundational orders are used, learners can begin to analyze material and break it into parts to find relationships among the parts. Mental activities include comparing, inquiring, contrasting, classifying, and differentiating.
Evaluating was the highest order in Bloom’s original 1956 classification, but has ceded the top spot in the redevelopment of the taxonomy. Nevertheless, in this order students think in complex ways to make judgments against criteria and form critiques or recommendations. Verbs embedded in evaluating objectives would be “argue,” “conclude,” “validate,” and “assess.”
Creativity has become one of the most valuable skills in our modern world. Thus, creating is at the top of the taxonomy. When students use their minds to create, they are operating at a high level of thinking, putting together elements in a functional, valuable way. Activities include developing, arranging, designing, planning, and formulating.
Teachers Can Use the Taxonomy to Develop Challenging Objectives
While the taxonomy was not originally designed as a hierarchy, it is useful to consider “remembering” as a lower-order and “creating” as a higher-order skill. Such a view is helpful because it allows instructors to develop enabling objectives, or prerequisite to higher orders. For instance, if a learner is to apply the quadratic formula to a complex quadratic, she must first be able to understanding what a quadratic equation is and in how the quadratic formula will help her solve it.
What is interesting is that the taxonomy can offer a blueprint for teachers trying to create sound instructional objectives and activities.
Consider an instructor designing a course unit in high school math. First, he would have to know what an objective is and what is does. That’s the first order. Then, he must understand how writing objectives will help him design a unit, and what those objectives should look like. Next, the teacher applies his knowledge to the unit that he has in mind, and begins to write objectives.
The teacher then has to analyze the objectives to determine how they fit in sequence, and whether they are written in a way to realize the desired learning outcomes. After the analysis, he can evaluate which components of his objectives are worthy to keep in the learning unit. Finally, he creates finalized, formal learning objectives.
Bloom’s taxonomy has become a valuable tool for teachers to understand how their practices influence their students’ cognitive development, and help to judge which activities are ultimately more challenging and valuable to promote high-level thinking.
References
Woolfolk, Anita. Educational Psychology, Ninth Edition. Boston: Pearson Education, 2004.
Richard Stowell - Rich Stowell teaches educational technology at the University of San Francisco and high school math at a charter school in Richmond, ...
