Bloom's taxonomy is a set of three hierarchical models used for classification of educational learning objectives into levels of complexity and specificity. The three lists cover the learning objectives in cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains. The cognitive domain list has been the primary focus of most traditional education and is frequently used to structure curriculum learning objectives, assessments and activities.
The models were named after Benjamin Bloom, who chaired the committee of educators that devised the taxonomy. He also edited the first volume of the standard text, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals. [1] [2]
The publication of Taxonomy of Educational Objectives followed a series of conferences from 1949 to 1953, which were designed to improve communication between educators on the design of curricula and examinations. [3]
The first volume of the taxonomy, Handbook I: Cognitive [1] was published in 1956, and in 1964 the second volume Handbook II: Affective was published. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] A revised version of the taxonomy for the cognitive domain was created in 2001. [9]
In the 1956 original version of the taxonomy, the cognitive domain is broken into the six levels of objectives listed below. [10] In the 2001 revised edition of Bloom's taxonomy, the levels have slightly different names and their order is revised: Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create (rather than Synthesize). [9] [11]
Level | Description | Example |
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Knowledge | Knowledge involves recognizing or remembering facts, terms, basic concepts, or answers without necessarily understanding what they mean. Some characteristics may include:
| Name three common varieties of apple. |
Comprehension | Comprehension involves demonstrating an understanding of facts and ideas by organizing, summarizing, translating, generalizing, giving descriptions, and stating the main ideas. | Summarize the identifying characteristics of a Golden Delicious apple and a Granny Smith apple. |
Application | Application involves using acquired knowledge to solve problems in new situations. This involves applying acquired knowledge, facts, techniques and rules. Learners should be able to use prior knowledge to solve problems, identify connections and relationships and how they apply in new situations. | Would apples prevent scurvy, a disease caused by a deficiency in vitamin C? |
Analysis | Analysis involves examining and breaking information into component parts, determining how the parts relate to one another, identifying motives or causes, making inferences, and finding evidence to support generalizations. Its characteristics include:
| Compare and contrast four ways of serving foods made with apples and examine which ones have the highest health benefits. |
Synthesis | Synthesis involves building a structure or pattern from diverse elements; it also refers to the act of putting parts together to form a whole or bringing pieces of information together to form a new meaning. Its characteristics include:
| Convert an "unhealthy" recipe for apple pie to a "healthy" recipe by replacing your choice of ingredients. Argue for the health benefits of using the ingredients you chose versus the original ones. |
Evaluation | Evaluation involves presenting and defending opinions by making judgments about information, the validity of ideas, or quality of work based on a set of criteria. Its characteristics include:
| Which kinds of apples are suitable for baking a pie, and why? |
Skills in the affective domain describe the way people react emotionally and their ability to feel other living things' pain or joy. Affective objectives typically target the awareness and growth in attitudes, emotion, and feelings.
There are five levels in the affective domain moving through the lowest-order processes to the highest.
Level | Description |
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Receiving | The lowest level; the student passively pays attention. Without this level, no learning can occur. Receiving is about the student's memory and recognition as well. |
Responding | The student actively participates in the learning process, not only attends to a stimulus; the student also reacts in some way. |
Valuing | The student attaches a value to an object, phenomenon, or piece of information. The student associates a value or some values to the knowledge they acquired. |
Organizing | The student can put together different values, information, and ideas, and can accommodate them within their own schema; the student is comparing, relating and elaborating on what has been learned. |
Characterizing | The student at this level tries to build abstract knowledge. |
Skills in the psychomotor domain describe the ability to physically manipulate a tool or instrument like a hand or a hammer. Psychomotor objectives usually focus on change or development in behavior or skills.
Bloom and his colleagues never created subcategories for skills in the psychomotor domain, but since then other educators have created their own psychomotor taxonomies. [7] In 1972, researcher Elizabeth Simpson proposed a taxonomy of seven levels. [12]
Level | Description | Examples | Keywords |
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Perception | The ability to use sensory cues to guide motor activity: This ranges from sensory stimulation, through cue selection, to translation. |
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Set | Readiness to act: It includes mental, physical, and emotional sets. These three sets are dispositions that predetermine a person's response to different situations (sometimes called mindsets). This subdivision of psychomotor is closely related with the "responding to phenomena" subdivision of the affective domain. |
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Guided response | The early stages of learning a complex skill that includes imitation and trial and error: Adequacy of performance is achieved by practicing. |
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Mechanism | The intermediate stage in learning a complex skill: Learned responses have become habitual and the movements can be performed with some confidence and proficiency. |
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Complex overt response | The skillful performance of motor acts that involve complex movement patterns: Proficiency is indicated by a quick, accurate, and highly coordinated performance, requiring a minimum amount of energy.This category includes performing without hesitation and automatic performance. For example, players will often utter sounds of satisfaction or expletives as soon as they hit a tennis ball or throw a football because they can tell by the feel of the act what the result will produce. |
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Adaptation | Skills are well developed and the individual can modify movement patterns to fit special requirements. |
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Origination | Creating new movement patterns to fit a particular situation or specific problem: Learning outcomes emphasize creativity based upon highly developed skills. |
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In the appendix to Handbook I, there is a definition of knowledge which serves as the apex for an alternative, summary classification of the educational goals. This is significant as the taxonomy has been called upon significantly in other fields such as knowledge management, potentially out of context. "Knowledge, as defined here, involves the recall of specifics and universals, the recall of methods and processes, or the recall of a pattern, structure, or setting." [13]
The taxonomy is set out as follows:
As Morshead (1965) pointed out on the publication of the second volume, the classification was not a properly constructed taxonomy, as it lacked a systematic rationale of construction.[ page needed ]
This was subsequently acknowledged in the discussion of the original taxonomy in its 2001 revision, [9] and the taxonomy was reestablished on more systematic lines.[ page needed ]
Some critiques of the taxonomy's cognitive domain admit the existence of these six categories but question the existence of a sequential, hierarchical link. [14] Often, educators view the taxonomy as a hierarchy and may mistakenly dismiss the lowest levels as unworthy of teaching. [15] [16] The learning of the lower levels enables the building of skills in the higher levels of the taxonomy, and in some fields, the most important skills are in the lower levels (such as identification of species of plants and animals in the field of natural history). [15] [16] Instructional scaffolding of higher-level skills from lower-level skills is an application of Vygotskian constructivism. [17] [18]
Some consider the three lowest levels as hierarchically ordered, but the three higher levels as parallel. [9] Others say that it is sometimes better to move to application before introducing concepts,[ citation needed ] the goal being to create a problem-based learning environment where the real world context comes first and the theory second, to promote the student's grasp of the phenomenon, concept, or event.
The distinction between the categories can be seen as artificial since any given cognitive task may entail a number of processes. It could even be argued that any attempt to nicely categorize cognitive processes into clean, cut-and-dried classifications undermines the holistic, highly connective and interrelated nature of cognition. [19] This is a criticism that can be directed at taxonomies of mental processes in general.
The taxonomy is widely implemented as a hierarchy of verbs, designed to be used when writing learning outcomes, but a 2020 analysis showed that these verb lists showed no consistency between educational institutions, and thus learning outcomes that were mapped to one level of the hierarchy at one educational institution could be mapped to different levels at another institution. [20]
Bloom's taxonomy serves as the backbone of many teaching philosophies, in particular, those that lean more towards skills rather than content. [8] [9] These educators view content as a vessel for teaching skills. The emphasis on higher-order thinking inherent in such philosophies is based on the top levels of the taxonomy including application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.[ citation needed ] Bloom's taxonomy can be used as a teaching tool to help balance evaluative and assessment-based questions in assignments, texts, and class engagements to ensure that all orders of thinking are exercised in students' learning, including aspects of information searching. [21]
Bloom's taxonomy (and the revised taxonomy) continues to be a source of inspiration for educational philosophy and for developing new teaching strategies. The skill development that takes place at higher orders of thinking interacts well with a developing global focus on multiple literacies and modalities in learning and the emerging field of integrated disciplines. [22] The ability to interface with and create media would draw upon skills from both higher order thinking skills (analysis, creation, and evaluation) and lower order thinking skills (knowledge, comprehension, and application). [23] [24]
Bloom's original taxonomy may not have included verbs or visual representations, but subsequent contributions to the idea have portrayed the ideas visually for researchers, teachers and students.
Educational psychology is the branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of human learning. The study of learning processes, from both cognitive and behavioral perspectives, allows researchers to understand individual differences in intelligence, cognitive development, affect, motivation, self-regulation, and self-concept, as well as their role in learning. The field of educational psychology relies heavily on quantitative methods, including testing and measurement, to enhance educational activities related to instructional design, classroom management, and assessment, which serve to facilitate learning processes in various educational settings across the lifespan.
Instructional design (ID), also known as instructional systems design and originally known as instructional systems development (ISD), is the practice of systematically designing, developing and delivering instructional materials and experiences, both digital and physical, in a consistent and reliable fashion toward an efficient, effective, appealing, engaging and inspiring acquisition of knowledge. The process consists broadly of determining the state and needs of the learner, defining the end goal of instruction, and creating some "intervention" to assist in the transition. The outcome of this instruction may be directly observable and scientifically measured or completely hidden and assumed. There are many instructional design models, but many are based on the ADDIE model with the five phases: analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation.
A graphic organizer, also known as a knowledge map, concept map, story map, cognitive organizer, advance organizer, or concept diagram, is a pedagogical tool that uses visual symbols to express knowledge and concepts through relationships between them. The main purpose of a graphic organizer is to provide a visual aid to facilitate learning and instruction.
Instructional scaffolding is the support given to a student by an instructor throughout the learning process. This support is specifically tailored to each student; this instructional approach allows students to experience student-centered learning, which tends to facilitate more efficient learning than teacher-centered learning. This learning process promotes a deeper level of learning than many other common teaching strategies.
Active learning is "a method of learning in which students are actively or experientially involved in the learning process and where there are different levels of active learning, depending on student involvement." Bonwell & Eison (1991) states that "students participate [in active learning] when they are doing something besides passively listening." According to Hanson and Moser (2003) using active teaching techniques in the classroom can create better academic outcomes for students. Scheyvens, Griffin, Jocoy, Liu, & Bradford (2008) further noted that "by utilizing learning strategies that can include small-group work, role-play and simulations, data collection and analysis, active learning is purported to increase student interest and motivation and to build students ‘critical thinking, problem-solving and social skills". In a report from the Association for the Study of Higher Education, authors discuss a variety of methodologies for promoting active learning. They cite literature that indicates students must do more than just listen in order to learn. They must read, write, discuss, and be engaged in solving problems. This process relates to the three learning domains referred to as knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSA). This taxonomy of learning behaviors can be thought of as "the goals of the learning process." In particular, students must engage in such higher-order thinking tasks as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
Benjamin Samuel Bloom was an American educational psychologist who made contributions to the classification of educational objectives and to the theory of mastery learning. He is particularly noted for leading educational psychologists to develop the comprehensive system of describing and assessing educational outcomes in the mid-1950s. He has influenced the practices and philosophies of educators around the world from the latter part of the twentieth century.
Constructivism in education is a theory that suggests that learners do not passively acquire knowledge through direct instruction. Instead, they construct their understanding through experiences and social interaction, integrating new information with their existing knowledge. This theory originates from Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development.
This is an index of education articles.
Cognitive apprenticeship is a theory that emphasizes the importance of the process in which a master of a skill teaches that skill to an apprentice.
Mastery learning is an instructional strategy and educational philosophy, first formally proposed by Benjamin Bloom in 1968. Mastery learning maintains that students must achieve a level of mastery in prerequisite knowledge before moving forward to learn subsequent information. If a student does not achieve mastery on the test, they are given additional support in learning and reviewing the information and then tested again. This cycle continues until the learner accomplishes mastery, and they may then move on to the next stage. In a self-paced online learning environment, students study the material and take assessments. If they make mistakes, the system provides insightful explanations and directs them to revisit the relevant sections. They then answer different questions on the same material, and this cycle repeats until they reach the established mastery threshold. Only then can they move on to subsequent learning modules, assessments, or certifications.
This glossary of education-related terms is based on how they commonly are used in Wikipedia articles. This article contains terms starting with T – Z. Select a letter from the table of contents to find terms on other articles.
Cultural competence, also known as intercultural competence, is a range of cognitive, affective, behavioural, and linguistic skills that lead to effective and appropriate communication with people of other cultures. Intercultural or cross-cultural education are terms used for the training to achieve cultural competence.
David Reading Krathwohl was an American educational psychologist. He was the director of the Bureau of Educational Research at Michigan State University and was also a past president of the American Educational Research Association, where he served in multiple capacities, as a member of the research advisory committee for the Bureau of Research of the USOE and as regional chairman of the board of trusties of the Eastern Regional Institute for Education.
Higher-order thinking, also known as higher order thinking skills (HOTS), is a concept applied in relation to education reform and based on learning taxonomies. The idea is that some types of learning require more cognitive processing than others, but also have more generalized benefits. In Bloom's taxonomy, for example, skills involving analysis, evaluation and synthesis are thought to be of a higher order than the learning of facts and concepts using lower-order thinking skills, which require different learning and teaching methods. Higher-order thinking involves the learning of complex judgmental skills such as critical thinking and problem solving.
Dialogue Education is a popular education approach to adult education first described by educator and entrepreneur Jane Vella in the 1980s. This approach to education is a proprietary commercial product licensed by Vermont-based company Global Learning Partners that draws on various adult learning theories, including those of Paulo Freire, Kurt Lewin, Malcolm Knowles and Benjamin Bloom. It is a synthesis of these theories into principles and practices that can be applied in a concrete way to learning design and facilitation. Dialogue Education is a form of Constructivism and can be a means for Transformative learning,.
The structure of observed learning outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy is a model that describes levels of increasing complexity in students' understanding of subjects. It was proposed by John B. Biggs and Kevin F. Collis.
Although the noun forms of the three words aim, objective and goal are often used synonymously, professionals in organised education define the educational aims and objectives more narrowly and consider them to be distinct from each other: aims are concerned with purpose whereas objectives are concerned with achievement.
Williams' taxonomy is a hierarchical arrangement of eight creative thinking skills conceived, developed, and researched by Frank E. Williams, a researcher in educational psychology. The taxonomy forms the basis of a differentiated instruction curriculum model used particularly with gifted students and in gifted education settings.
Critical understanding is a term used commonly in education to define a mode of thinking, described as, ‘an essential tool for participating in democratic processes, at whatever level.’ It is a defensible position reached through the examination of ideas, issues or sources. It is achieved through reflecting upon, analysing and evaluating different ideas and positions, and is demonstrated through an ability to express informed responses and independent thought. Critical understanding develops through analytical and independent thought and is considered an increasingly important element of the education process as students progress to higher and further education. However it is not an easy concept to communicate for it is not a passive thing we do; it is about active engagement.
In education, authentic learning is an instructional approach that allows students to explore, discuss, and meaningfully construct concepts and relationships in contexts that involve real-world problems and projects that are relevant to the learner. It refers to a "wide variety of educational and instructional techniques focused on connecting what students are taught in school to real-world issues, problems, and applications. The basic idea is that students are more likely to be interested in what they are learning, more motivated to learn new concepts and skills, and better prepared to succeed in college, careers, and adulthood if what they are learning mirrors real-life contexts, equips them with practical and useful skills, and addresses topics that are relevant and applicable to their lives outside of school."
Biology is often referred to as an observational science almost as a slur, with the implication that biologists simply look at the living world without the strong theoretical and mathematic underpinnings of a science like physics. There is the suggestion that observation is easy. Thus biology is viewed as a lightweight science—anyone can do it: just go out and start looking, at birds, at grass, at cells under the microscope. Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy of learning tasks puts observation at the lowest level, with recall of information. This denigration of observation has long bothered me because I see it as often difficult and complex, a skill that needs to be learned and a talent that is much more developed in some.
Ironically, the dogma that has been so detrimental to field taxonomy is known as Bloom's taxonomy. University lecturers are told to apply an educational theory developed by Benjamin Bloom, which categorises assessment tasks and learning activities into cognitive domains. In Bloom's taxonomy, identifying and naming are at the lowest level of cognitive skills and have been systematically excluded from University degrees because they are considered simplistic.
When supporting students outside the classroom situation, a subject aware advisor should be capable of spotting mistakes in a student's solution and of analysing these mistakes to identify the difficulty that the student is encountering. Such support can be seen as offering scaffolding in a student's 'zone of proximal development' (Vygotsky, 1978) and exemplified by teaching students to analyse a problem through the identification of the key elements and the relationships between these elements.