5.7 | Bloom's Taxonomy Transcript
Bloom's Taxonomy | Structuring the Learning Journey
Bloom's Taxonomy is a toolbox that teachers or students can use to classify and organize learning objectives. Its most popular version is based on the cognitive domain and assumes that learning should be structured from easy to difficult in the following six steps:
- remember
- understand
- apply
- analyze
- evaluate
- create
On the first level, we learn to remember. There is just rote memorization and recollection of facts without much understanding, for example, if we learn about lemons we want to remember the name, shape, color, size and that they are sour. Once we memorize these essentially meaningless facts we move to the second level of learning. On level two we learn to understand. We begin to decode information and learn that a lemon is yellow when it's ripe to eat and if we take a bite that it's really super sour, we also understand that lemons love sunshine and that they contain lots of vitamin C which is a great natural antioxidant that keeps us healthy.
Now, as we really understand a lemon, we can work with it. On the third level, we apply what we know. We've understood that while lemons are sour they are also a great provider of vitamin C. To apply this knowledge in a meaningful way we could boil a lemon into hot water and add some honey, then serve this hot lemon to our sick sister who's in need of treatment. On the 4th level we learn to analyze, this involves examining and breaking down information into components determining how the parts relate to one another and finding evidence to support generalizations. We study the lemon flesh, examine the skin and look at levels of vitamins. We conclude that we can eat everything inside while the skin tastes bitter and contains traces of toxic pesticides it ought not to be consumed.
Now we are ready to evaluate, we analyze, critique, and compare. To evaluate our lemon as a good source of vitamins we compare it to other sources such as oranges and supplements. We look at the following properties: vitamin levels, affordability, taste, and packaging waste. If we evaluate our thoughts critically and without bias we learn where the lemons score high and where others score higher.
Now after we have learned, understood. applied, analyzed, and evaluated, we are ready to create. As we now really understand lemons also in comparison to similar things we can formulate a plan to create our own natural lemonade. It's now easy to come up with a cute shop design a good name and a good slogan: "natural, healthy, yummy."
Bloom's Taxonomy was first created in 1946 by American psychologist Benjamin Bloom. The revised version from 2001, as just presented, serves as the backbone of many teaching philosophies in particular those that aim towards teaching specific skills. Each level usually comes with a clear learning objective that can be tested. Critics of the taxonomy often questioned the existence of a sequential hierarchical link between each level. What are your thoughts?