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.
The first volume of the taxonomy, Handbook I: Cognitive was published in 1956, and in 1964 the second volume Handbook II: Affective was published.[3] [4] [5] [6] [7] A revised version of the taxonomy for the cognitive domain was created in 2001.[8]
In the 1956 original version of the taxonomy, the cognitive domain is broken into the six levels of objectives listed below.[9] 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).[8] [10]
| Level | Description | Example | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 | |
|---|---|---|
| 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. In 1972, researcher Elizabeth Simpson proposed a taxonomy of seven levels.[11]
| Level | Description | Examples | Keywords | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Perception | The ability to use sensory cues to guide motor activity: This ranges from sensory stimulation, through cue selection, to translation. | |||
| 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. | |||
| Guided response | The early stages of learning a complex skill that includes imitation and trial and error: Adequacy of performance is achieved by practicing. | |||
| 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. | |||
| 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. | (Note: The key words are the same as in mechanism, but will have adverbs or adjectives that indicate that the performance is quicker, better, more accurate, etc.) | ||
| Adaptation | Skills are well developed and the individual can modify movement patterns to fit special requirements. | |||
| Origination | Creating new movement patterns to fit a particular situation or specific problem: Learning outcomes emphasize creativity based upon highly developed skills. |
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."
The taxonomy is set out as follows:
As 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.
This was subsequently acknowledged in the discussion of the original taxonomy in its 2001 revision, and the taxonomy was reestablished on more systematic lines.
Some critiques of the taxonomy's cognitive domain admit the existence of these six categories but question the existence of a sequential, hierarchical link.[12] Often, educators view the taxonomy as a hierarchy and may mistakenly dismiss the lowest levels as unworthy of teaching.[13] [14] 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).[13] [14] Instructional scaffolding of higher-level skills from lower-level skills is an application of Vygotskian constructivism.[15] [16]
Some consider the three lowest levels as hierarchically ordered, but the three higher levels as parallel. Others say that it is sometimes better to move to application before introducing concepts, 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.[17] 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.[18]
Bloom's taxonomy serves as the backbone of many teaching philosophies, in particular, those that lean more towards skills rather than content. 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. 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.[19]
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.[20] 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).[21] [22]
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.