5.7 | Bloom's Taxonomy

Bloom's Taxonomy

Bloom's Taxonomy is a classification of the different skills that educators set for their students (learning objectives). Simply put, Bloom's taxonomy is a framework for educational achievement in which each level depends on the one that precedes it. The taxonomy was proposed by Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist, and has been updated to include the following six levels of learning. These six levels can be used to help you begin to write your learning outcomes and objectives and align them with course assessments and learning activities.1 

  1. Remembering: Retrieving, recognizing, and recalling relevant knowledge from long‐term memory.
  2. Understanding: Constructing meaning from oral, written, and graphic messages through interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing, and explaining.
  3. Applying: Carrying out or using a procedure for executing, or implementing.
  4. Analyzing: Breaking material into constituent parts, determining how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose through differentiating, organizing, and attributing.
  5. Evaluating: Making judgments based on criteria and standards through checking and critiquing.
  6. Creating: Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure through generating, planning, or producing.

Bloom's Taxonomy pyramid containing six levels of learning.

Applying Bloom's Taxonomy

Instructors can apply Bloom’s taxonomy by asking questions and delivering assignments that directly correlate with specific learning objectives in each stage of the process, making the objectives transparent to the student. For example, posing multiple-choice questions can help gauge a student’s level of basic understanding and remembering of a subject, while asking a student to come up with a comparison or analogy points towards entering the application or analysis stage.

This model is a powerful tool to help develop learning objectives because it explains the process of learning: 

  • Before you can understand a concept, you must remember it
  • To apply a concept you must first understand it
  • In order to evaluate a process, you must have analyzed it
  • To create an accurate conclusion, you must have completed a thorough evaluation

Watch this short video (4:46) which illustrates Bloom's Taxonomy and takes you on a journey through the progression of the levels of learning. 

 

Prefer to read than watch? Check out the video transcript. 

As you continue to evaluate equitable grading practices in your own class, having clear and measurable student learning objectives (SLOs) that align with the assessments is where the process must start. Please navigate to the next page to learn strategies for developing SLOs. 

Works Cited

  1. Shabatura, J. "Using Bloom's Taxonomy to Write Effective Learning Objectives. University of Arkansas Links to an external site.. 27 September 2013. Accessed 8 January 2022. 

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