Presented by Ana GoreaETRC, November 4, 2008

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited.

(Plutarch)

Bloom’s Taxonomy - history

In 1956 Benjamin Bloom headed a group of educational psychologists who developed a classification of levels of intellectual behavior important in learning;

The research showed that 95 % of the test questions required students to think only at the lowest level, i.e. to recall information

The original Bloom’s taxonomy

evaluation

synthesis

analysis

application

comprehension

knowledge

The six levels

Knowledge Comprehension Application Analysis Synthesis Evaluation

Description skill definition key words

knowledge Recall information Identify, describe, name, label,

recognize, reproduce, follow

Comprehen-sion

Understand the meaning, paraphrase a concept

Summarize, convert, defend, paraphrase, interpret, give

examples

application Use the information or concept in a new situation

Build, make, construct, model,

predict, prepare

analysis Break information or concepts into parts to understand it more fully

Compare/contrast, break down,

distinguish, select, separate

synthesis Put ideas together to form

something new Categorize, generalize, reconstruct

evaluation Make judgments about value

Appraise, critique, judge, justify, argue, support

Need for revision

The world is a different place;Educators have learned a great deal

more about how students learn and teachers teach;

Teaching and learning encompasses more than just thinking.

Marzano’s critique of Bloom’s taxonomy (2000)

A hierarchical taxonomy implies that each higher skill is composed of the skills beneath it;

This is not true of the cognitive processes in Bloom’s taxonomy;

Nearly all complex learning activities require the use of several different cognitive skills.

Strengths of Bloom’s taxonomy

It has taken the very important topic of thinking and placed a structure around it that is usable by practitioners;

Teachers who keep a list of question prompts encourage higher-order thinking skills in their students

Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy

In 1999, Dr. Lorin Anderson, a former student of Bloom’s, and his colleagues published an updated version of Bloom’s taxonomy that takes into account a broader range of factors that have an impact on teaching and learning.

The revised taxonomy differentiates between “knowing what”, the content of thinking and “knowing how”, the procedures used in solving problems.

Knowledge Dimension “knowing what”

Has four categories:

- Factual

- Conceptual

- Procedural

- Metacognitive (self-awareness, knowledge and experience we have about our own cognitive processes)

Knowledge Dimension “knowing what”

Factual knowledge includes isolated bits of information, such as vocabulary definitions and knowledge about scientific details;

Conceptual knowledge consists of systems of information, such as classifications and categories;

Knowledge Dimension “knowing what”

Procedural knowledge includes algorithms, heuristics or rules of thumb (educated guesses, intuitive judgment), techniques, and methods as well as knowledge about when to use these procedures;

Metacognitive knowledge refers to knowledge of thinking processes and information about how to manipulate these processes effectively.

The Cognitive Process Dimensionof the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy

Has six skills from simplest to most complex:- Remember- Understand- Apply- Analyse- Evaluate- Create

The Cognitive Process Dimension

Remembering consists of recognizing and recalling relevant information from long-term memory;

Understanding is the ability to make your own meaning from educational material such as reading and teacher explanations. The subskills for this process include interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing and explaining;

The Cognitive Process Dimension

Applying refers to using a learned procedure either in a familiar or new situation;

Analysis consists of breaking knowledge down into parts and thinking about how the parts relate to its overall structure. Students analyse by differentiating, organizing and attributing.

The Cognitive Process Dimension

Evaluation includes checking and critiquing; Creating, not included in the earlier

taxonomy, is the highest component of the new version. This skills involves putting things together to make something new. To accomplish the creating tasks, learners generate, plan, and produce.

The Cognitive Process Dimension

According to this taxonomy, each level of knowledge can correspond to each level of cognitive process, so a student can remember factual or procedural knowledge, understand conceptual or metacognitive knowledge, or analyze metacognitive or factual knowledge

Original Terms New Terms Evaluation

Synthesis

Analysis

Application

Comprehension

Knowledge

•Creating

•Evaluating

•Analysing

•Applying

•Understanding

•Remembering

Change in Terms The names of six major categories were changed

from noun to verb forms. As the taxonomy reflects different forms of

thinking and thinking is an active process verbs were more accurate.

The subcategories of the six major categories were also replaced by verbs.

Some subcategories were reorganised.

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Change in Terms

The knowledge category was renamed. Knowledge is a product of thinking and was inappropriate to describe a category of thinking and was replaced with the word remembering instead.

Comprehension became understanding and synthesis was renamed creating in order to better reflect the nature of the thinking described by each category.

Change in Emphasis

More authentic tool for curriculum planning, instructional delivery and assessment.

Aimed at a broader audience. Easily applied to all levels of schooling. The revision emphasises explanation and

description of subcategories.

Higher-order thinking by students involves the transformation of information and ideas. This transformation occurs when students combine facts and ideas and synthesise, generalise, explain, hypothesise or arrive at some conclusion or interpretation. Manipulating information and ideas through these processes allows students to solve problems, gain understanding and discover new meaning.

When students engage in the construction of knowledge, an element of uncertainty is introduced into the instructional process and the outcomes are not always predictable; in other words, the teacher is not certain what the students will produce. In helping students become producers of knowledge, the teacher’s main instructional task is to create activities or environments that allow them opportunities to engage in higher-order thinking.

The basic question is how to improve human thinking

Although it received little attention when first published, Bloom's Taxonomy has since been translated into 22 languages and is one of the most widely applied and most often cited references in education.

A good teacher makes you think even when you don’t want to.

(Fisher, 1998, Teaching Thinking)