Bloom's Taxonomy
Bloom's Taxonomy
Bloom's Taxonomy is a method for categorizing educational objectives and goals that was first created by Benjamin Bloom in 1956. The core of this framework is the focus on higher-order thinking skills, and it has been utilized extensively in the areas of curriculum development, assessment, and educational planning as a tool to improve the quality of teaching and learning.
What are the levels of Bloom's Taxonomy?
Bloom's Taxonomy is made up of six levels starting from lower to higher-order thinking skills: 1) Remembering: the act of recalling facts and basic concepts, 2) Understanding: the act of providing explanations for ideas or concepts, 3) Applying: the act of using data in new situations, 4) Analyzing: the act of establishing links between ideas, 5) Evaluating: the act of supporting a decision or line of action, and 6) Creating: the act of making something new or producing original work. A teacher could, for instance, request learners to 'design a new marketing plan' in order to gauge their understanding at the highest level.
How can Bloom's Taxonomy be applied in the classroom?
Teachers can utilize Bloom's Taxonomy to create lesson plans, as they can also use Bloom's Taxonomy to curate assessments, which encourage critical thinking. By designing learning tasks that would address the various levels of the taxonomy, such as instructing students to summarize a text (Understanding) or critique an argument (Evaluating), teachers can entail a more profound interaction with the material and thus, positively affect the learning outcomes. For example, a teacher of science could assign students to carry out an experiment (Applying) and be tasked to interpret their results (Analyzing) afterward.
What is the significance of the revised Bloom's Taxonomy?
In the 2000s, Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl updated the Bloom's Taxonomy, now referred to as the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy. They made it more dynamic and reflect a conceptual shift to a two-dimensional framework that not only cognitive processes but also knowledge dimensions (factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive) are included in it. This adjustment is viewed primarily as a means of addressing how knowledge is being schemed, built, and applied besides explaining it; thus, the emphasis is on the relevance of the teaching-learning process to the current educational practices.
Can Bloom's Taxonomy be used for assessment purposes?
Certainly, you're right that Bloom's Taxonomy is a very efficient method of assessment. This is because it presents a systematic way to assess student performance at various cognitive levels. By making assessments that correspond to a variety of levels in the taxonomy, teachers would be able to assure they are bearing not only the students' recall of facts (Remembering) but also their ability to develop and assess (synthesis and evaluation) as well. An example of this would be the final test that may contain multi-choice question items for Remembering and essay prompts for Evaluating, thus providing a wider range of measurement of student understanding.