Bloom Taxonomy | Revised Bloom Taxonomy
“After forty years of intensive research on school learning in the United States as well as abroad, my major conclusion is: What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn if provided with appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.”
Benjamin Bloom
What is Bloom’s Taxonomy?
Bloom’s Taxonomy is a classification of different objectives and skills that educators set for their students (learning objectives).
Bloom’s taxonomy is a framework designed for educational achievement in which each level depends on the one below it. It’s often portrayed in the form of a pyramid.
In other words, Bloom’s Taxonomy is a hierarchical ordering of cognitive skills that can, among countless other applications, help teachers teach and pupils learn.
The Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, known as Bloom’s Taxonomy (Max Englehart, Edward Furst, Walter Hill, and David Krathwohl in 1956) is one of the most appreciated learning theories in the field of education. Educators often use Bloom’s Taxonomy to generate learning outcomes that target not only concerns related to the subject but also the profundity of learning the students must achieve, and to then formulate assessments that exactly report on learners’ progress towards these results.
Basic knowledge, the initial stage of learning, drives to the development of the skills and abilities that are crucial to achieving the pedagogical process: Comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The idea is that students move up each level of the pyramid in Bloom’s taxonomy, starting from very basic learning to acquire profound knowledge on a subject, amidst each level essential to the advancement of the next.
Uses of Bloom’s Taxonomy
- formulate assessments
- design lessons
- evaluate the complexity of tasks
- draft curriculum outlines
- develop online courses
- plan project-based learning
- self-assessment
The Three Domains of Learning
The committee identified the following three domains of educational activities or learning:
* Cognitive: Mental skills (knowledge)
* Affective: Enhancement in feelings or emotional aspects (attitude)
* Psychomotor: Manual or physical skills (skills)
Designers, trainers, and educators often refer to them as KSA (Knowledge [cognitive], Skills [psychomotor], and Attitudes [affective]). This taxonomy of learning styles may be regarded as “the goals of the learning process.” After a learning experience, the learner should possess a new skill, knowledge, and/or attitude.
The Cognitive Domain in Bloom’s taxonomy
Knowledge and development of intellectual skills are at the core of the cognitive domain of Bloom’s taxonomy, whereby a student can recognize facts, patterns, and concepts that will benefit for profound learning. The six key phases of Bloom’s taxonomy are:
- Knowledge involves the recall of methods and processes, or the recall of a pattern, structure, or framework.
- Comprehension refers to a type of understanding in which an individual understands what is being communicated and can use them by perceiving its entire implications.
- Application refers to the use of ideas in circumstantial and concrete circumstances.
- Analysis represents the categorization of communication into its integral elements such that the corresponding hierarchy of ideas is clear and/or the relations between ideas expressed are made explicit.
- Synthesis means collecting all the elements and parts.
- Evaluation induces judgments regarding the value of material and methods.
The Affective Domain in Bloom’s taxonomy
In this domain, students have new feelings or emotions about the subject, and/or themselves. They are capable to put extra value on something, and have a greater appreciation for it, along with different motivations and attitudes. In a medical or care-giving environment, students might be able to demonstrate empathy towards patients or children. Students can be assessed in several ways when it comes to the affective domain, such as their ability to listen with respect and provide their consistent attention, actively participate in class discussions, resolve conflicts and exhibit consistent and pervasive behaviors that reflect their internalized values.
The Psychomotor Domain in Bloom’s taxonomy
The psychomotor domain is a later addition to Bloom’s taxonomy, as the original team did not believe they had sufficient knowledge in teaching such skills at the post-secondary level. In this domain, students develop manual or physical skills. There are three versions: physical movement, coordination and the use of motor skills. A student in a medical environment might demonstrate psychomotor development by properly stitching a wound. Psychomotor skills can represent basic manual tasks, like washing a car or planting a garden, as well as more complex activities, like operating heavy machinery or grasping choreographed dance steps. Psychomotor skills are measured in terms of speed, precision, distance, procedures, and technique.
Why is Bloom’s taxonomy important?
Bloom’s taxonomy has been actively used by teachers from K-12 to college professors for over five decades. Yet it is just as important today as back in the ’50s.
Bloom’s taxonomy is designed such that teachers and students achieve learning goals and build an ultimate plan to meet them.
Educators can efficiently organize objectives and formulate lesson plans with relevant content and instruction to guide students the pyramid of learning. Educators can also design accurate assessment tools and strategies to ensure each category is met in turn, and that each part of the course material is in line with the level’s objectives.
For students, Bloom’s taxonomy bridge the gap between their current learning and tells them what they need to learn in order to attain a higher level of knowledge.
At the end of the learning process, the goal of Bloom’s taxonomy is that a student has sharpened a new skill, level of knowledge, and/or developed a different attitude towards the subject. Also, teachers are able to effectively evaluate this learning on an ongoing basis, as the course moves through each stage of the framework.
Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (2001)
A revised version of Bloom’s Taxonomy was released by a group of cognitive psychologists, curriculum theorists and instructional researchers in 2001 with the title A Taxonomy for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment. This title draws attention aside from the somewhat static concept of “educational objectives” (in Bloom’s original title) and points to a more dynamic perception of classification.
Some changes made in the Cognitive Domain. The three most prominent ones are:
- changing the names in the six categories from noun to verb forms
- rearranging them as shown in the chart below
- creating processes and levels of knowledge matrix
This new taxonomy reflects a more rapid mode of thinking and is perhaps more accurate.
Level 1: Remember
It means to retrieve, recognize, and recall related knowledge from memory.
In this first stage of Bloom’s taxonomy, you might ask students to explain something you’ve taught them, demanding knowledge from previous lectures or notes. It’s the most basic level in Bloom’s taxonomy but depicts an important base; a stepping stone towards deep learning. A simple idea to examine learning on this level is to ask questions. If the student answers, it shows that the student is able to memorize facts and remembers them. It does not imply that the student really perceives the material.
Level 2: Understand
Ask students to discuss a problem or idea, in order to evaluate their comprehension from the “remembering” stage of Bloom’s taxonomy. For example, you may ask them to paraphrase a story or definition, demonstrate a concept or tell a story that relates to it in their own words. A student who attains this level are capable of interpreting the material and demonstrate an understanding of the material.
Level 3: Apply
The student has to take what they have learned and apply it to real-world problems. For example, they can use mathematics formula to determine the family budget or bills. By doing this, they would also get a reason to study.
Level 4: Analyze
Now we reach the higher half of the learning levels in Bloom’s taxonomy. Here, students can draw relationships between ideas, utilize critical thinking, and breakdown knowledge into the sum of its parts. This includes breaking material into constituent parts, determining how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure using logical deduction. On achieving this level of Bloom’s taxonomy, a student can prove that they fully understand the material on the whole.
Level 5: Evaluate
Here the student makes an intellectual judgment about the value of the material they’ve just learned, applied and analyzed, to be able to tell the difference between facts and opinions or inferences. That could include finding an effective solution to a problem, or justifying a specific decision and being able to back up that justification with knowledge. Tools like surveys and blogs can help at this particular level.
Level 6: Create
In the final level of Bloom’s taxonomy, the student manifests full knowledge by applying what they’ve learned, analyzed and evaluated, and building something, either factual or conceptual. That could include writing a manual or report on a particular topic, designing a piece of machinery, or revising a process to improve the results. Projects can range from detailed essays that put parts of the learning together to form a whole concept or idea, or networking with others to discuss the merits of a study.
Conclusion
In this blog, we have seen Bloom’s Taxonomy, it’s uses and implementation and Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy in detail. Also, we discussed the three domains of learning.
In the next blog, we will look at Course Outcome and how to write Course Outcome with the help of Revised Bloom Taxonomy.
References
- https://tips.uark.edu/using-blooms-taxonomy/
- https://tophat.com/blog/blooms-taxonomy-ultimate-guide/
- https://www.teachthought.com/learning/what-is-blooms-taxonomy-a-definition-for-teachers/
- https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/
- Anderson, L., & Krathwohl, D. A. (2001). Taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York: Longman.
- http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html
- https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/teaching-resources/teaching-tips/planning-courses-and-assignments/course-design/blooms-taxonomy
- http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/ahold/revised_taxonomy.jpg
- https://www.teachthought.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/B8F0FC46-9B1E-4D6D-8E1C-6090462F95F6.png
- https://tophat.com/wp-content/uploads/Blooms-Taxonomy-Explained.png
