Bloom's taxonomy

 

            Bloom’s Taxonomy is a phrase I have heard over and over for the past 20 years. Our school district heavily uses Bloom’s Taxonomy in all learning and in all subjects.

            In 1956, Benjamin Bloom headed a group of educational psychologists who developed a classification of levels of intellectual behavior important in learning. Bloom found that over 95 % of the test questions students encounter require them to think only at the lowest possible level...the recall of information (Instructional Design Central, LLC, 2016).

         The original Bloom’s taxonomy pyramid named its orders of learning with nouns: beginning with knowledge, the pyramid rose up through the stages of comprehension, application, analysis and synthesis, culminating in evaluation as the highest order of learning. The original taxonomy was intended for use as an assessment tool, to help formulate exam and evaluation questions. But the use of nouns to name each order of learning had the unintended effect of making Bloom’s taxonomy unnecessarily abstract and less easy to apply (Preville, 2018).

         In the 1990s, Bloom’s taxonomy was revised through a new assembly of experts led by one of Bloom’s former students, Lorin Anderson.3 Published in 2001, the revised version uses verbs instead of nouns to describe the orders of learning, while also inverting the top two orders of learning: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing and evaluating, with creating as its summit (Preville, 2018).

        Bloom’s taxonomy has been used in pedagogy as a useful tool to create clear structure, vision, and learning process parameters on which any course can be built and developed. Bloom’s taxonomy simply distinguishes six steps in the learning process, which are achievable through the process of education, and attainable while going through the course (Pikhart and Klimova, 2019).

 The basic levels of acquired skills and competencies are:

1. Remember—recalling facts, information, and basic ideas memorized by heart; this is just plain memorizing and learning by heart without any creative approach or specific performance, yet important and useful at very early stages of the learning process

2. Understand—being able to explain to others the idea that has been remembered, in the form of a presentation or any other means that will prove that the student understands the idea

3. Apply—being able to use the acquired information in new contexts and situations and transferring it into everyday life; this means transferring acquired ideas into a practical context, bringing them into life and usage

4. Analyze—creating connections and trying to compare and contrast them with each other; analyzing means being able to find connections and causal relationships in reportedly

disconnected items

5. Evaluate—developing a more creative approach while being able to appraise and defend one’s own opinions and ideas; evaluation creates a very high level of understanding and mental skills by being able to defend the ideas acquired in the learning process

6. Create—highest level, means being able to produce a new idea based on the items already learned; creativity is the highest achievable goal that proves that the student has reached independence.

 (Pikhart and Klimova, 2019)

         All these six skills are necessary in the learning process; however, they create a naturally developing sequence starting from number one as the easiest, to number six, which is the most complicated but also most desired. They all, to differing extents, in various volumes and widths, are present in any learning process; however, Bloom’s taxonomy helps us to deliberately use them with a rather more systematic approach to the blended learning process and online course creation (Pikhart and Klimova, 2019).

 

Why Bloom’s Taxonomy works

        Bloom’s Taxonomy works well in our school district because it provides a greater clarity in assessments and has more clearly stated learning objectives. At the heart of Bloom’s taxonomy framework is the ability to create achievable learning goals that teachers and students understand, and build a definitive plan to meet them. Instructors are encouraged to view learning objectives in behavioral terms, such that they can see what students are capable of as a direct result of the instruction they have received at each level, without the need for class-wide generalizations (Persaud, 2023).

        Bloom’s makes it easy to organize objectives and create lesson plans with appropriate content and instruction to lead students up the pyramid of learning. Bloom’s taxonomy could seem a very old-fashioned tool and its implementation in modern online courses and other electronic tools for communication could appear obsolete. Instead, Bloom’s Taxonomy is a powerful tool that elegantly connects modern information media with traditional and well-established pedagogical tools (Pikhart and Klimova, 2019).

        Teachers like myself, who teach career technical education courses, can also utilize Bloom’s Taxonomy. Mobile apps and Web 2.0 tools can facilitate implementation of activities requiring students to use skills at the top three levels of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy--analyzing, evaluating, and creating (Brooks-Young, 2012). Lessons using video production, creating podcasts, infographics, a screencast, or photo stories fit right into Bloom’s use of higher order thinking skills. You can also have students challenge each other to recall facts, or make a list at the end of the class of the most important facts they learned that day (Persaud, 2023).

        Bloom’s also works well in classroom because each level of Bloom’s taxonomy should be addressed before moving on to the next (Persaud, 2023). That way, as a teacher, you can break down lessons step by step and plan on when to introduce new concepts, when to reinforce them, and how to test them (Persaud, 2023).

        Educators can use the tools of Bloom’s taxonomy to precisely focus curricula throughout the year on specific parts of the framework, ensuring that students demonstrate the proper cognitive abilities in each assignment and exam before moving on to the next (Persaud, 2023). This way, students can have clear, concise, and measurable goals to achieve.

        In an era of rising student distraction, it’s more important than ever to set clear expectations. Bloom’s taxonomy helps instructors be crystal clear about outcomes and expectations. And when students know just how high they are expected to reach to get the grade they want, they’re more likely to stay engaged (Preville, 2018).

References

Brooks-Young, S. (2012, September 24). 5 Tech-Friendly Lessons to Encourage Higher-Order Thinking. The Journal. Retrieved November 12, 2023, from https://thejournal.com/articles/2012/09/24/5-mediarich-lesson-ideas-to-encourage-higherorder-thinking.aspx

Persaud, C. (2023, February 25). Bloom’s Taxonomy: The Ultimate Guide. Top Hat. Retrieved November 12, 2023, from https://tophat.com/blog/blooms-taxonomy/

Pikhart, M., & Klimova, B. (2019). Utilization of Linguistic Aspects of Bloom’s Taxonomy in Blended Learning. Department of Applied Linguistics, University of Hradec Kralove, 9(3), 235. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci9030235

Preville, P. (2018, July 4). Bloom’s Taxonomy: A History and Why It’s Important. Top Hat. Retrieved November 12, 2023, from https://tophat.com/blog/blooms-taxonomy-history-important/