Theorist of the Week

This week's theorist is Benjamin Bloom.  You would recognize him for Bloom's Taxonomy.

The authors of the revised taxonomy underscore this dynamism, using verbs and gerunds to label their categories and subcategories (rather than the nouns of the original taxonomy). These “action words” describe the cognitive processes by which thinkers encounter and work with knowledge:

• Remember
  • Recognizing
  • Recalling
• Understand
  • Interpreting
  • Exemplifying
  • Classifying
  • Summarizing
  • Inferring
  • Comparing
  • Explaining
• Apply
  • Executing
  • Implementing
• Analyze
  • Differentiating
  • Organizing
  • Attributing
• Evaluate
  • Checking
  • Critiquing
• Create
  • Generating
  • Planning
  • Producing

In the revised taxonomy, knowledge is at the basis of these six cognitive processes, but its authors created a separate taxonomy of the types of knowledge used in cognition:

• Factual Knowledge
  • Knowledge of terminology
  • Knowledge of specific details and elements
• Conceptual Knowledge
  • Knowledge of classifications and categories
  • Knowledge of principles and generalizations
  • Knowledge of theories, models, and structures
• Procedural Knowledge
  • Knowledge of subject-specific skills and algorithms
  • Knowledge of subject-specific techniques and methods
  • Knowledge of criteria for determining when to use appropriate procedures
• Metacognitive Knowledge
  • Strategic Knowledge
  • Knowledge about cognitive tasks, including appropriate contextual and conditional knowledge
  • Self-knowledge

Mary Forehand from the University of Georgia provides a guide to the revised version giving a brief summary of the revised taxonomy and a helpful table of the six cognitive processes and four types of knowledge.

Using Bloom’s Taxonomy in Lessons

The authors of the revised taxonomy suggest a multi-layered answer to this question, to which the author of this teaching guide has added some clarifying points:

1. Objectives (learning goals) are important to establish in a pedagogical interchange so that teachers and students alike understand the purpose of that interchange.
2. Organizing objectives helps to clarify objectives for themselves and for students.
3. Having an organized set of objectives helps teachers to:
   • “plan and deliver appropriate instruction”;
   • “design valid assessment tasks and strategies”; and
   • “ensure that instruction and assessment are aligned with the objectives.”

Citations are from A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.

Example edTPA Commentary using Bloom's:  The lesson segment was intentionally structured to pace student learning by providing opportunities to check for understanding so that instruction, content, and student learning can build on each other. The lesson segment is influenced by Bloom's Taxonomy by implementing components of Bloom's Cognitive Domain.  Students are asked to recall prior knowledge, demonstrate an understanding of new content through discussion before applying it to the learning activities.  After students have had multiple chances to practice the application of new content knowledge, students then analyze and synthesize information through comparison before devising a strategy (Bloom, Englehart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956).