BLOOM`S TAXONOMY

Bloom's Taxonomy was created in 1956 under the leadership of educational psychologist Dr Benjamin Bloom in order to promote higher forms of thinking in education, such as analyzing and evaluating concepts, processes, procedures, and principles, rather than just remembering facts (rote learning). It is most often used when designing educational, training, and learning processes.

The Three Domains of Learning

The committee identified three domains of educational activities or learning (Bloom, et al. 1956):

Cognitive: mental skills (knowledge)

Affective: growth in feelings or emotional areas (attitude or self)

Psychomotor: manual or physical skills (skills)

Since the work was produced by higher education, the words tend to be a little bigger than we normally use. Domains may be thought of as categories. Instructional designers, trainers, and educators often refer to these three categories as KSA (Knowledge [cognitive], Skills [psychomotor], and Attitudes [affective]). This taxonomy of learning behaviors may be thought of as “the goals of the learning process.” That is, after a learning episode, the learner should have acquired a new skill, knowledge, and/or attitude.

While the committee produced an elaborate compilation for the cognitive and affective domains, they omitted the psychomotor domain. Their explanation for this oversight was that they have little experience in teaching manual skills within the college level. However, there have been at least three psychomotor models created by other researchers.

Their compilation divides the three domains into subdivisions, starting from thved Learning Outcome (SOLO). However, Bloom's taxonomy is easily understood and is probably the most widely applied one in use today.

e simplest cognitive process or behavior to the most complex. The divisions outlined are not absolutes and there are other systems or hierarchies that have been devised, such as the Structure of Obser

Cognitive Domain

learner thinking - cognitive domain

The cognitive domain involves knowledge and the development of intellectual skills (Bloom, 1956). This includes the recall or recognition of specific facts, procedural patterns, and concepts that serve in the development of intellectual abilities and skills. There are six major categories of cognitive an processes, starting from the simplest to the most complex (see the table below for an in-depth coverage of each category):

Knowledge

Comprehension

Application

Analysis

Synthesis

Evaluation

The categories can be thought of as degrees of difficulties. That is, the first ones must normally be mastered before the next one can take place.

Lorin Anderson, a former student of Bloom, and David Krathwohl revisited the cognitive domain in the mid-nineties and made some changes, with perhaps the three most prominent ones being (Anderson, Krathwohl, Airasian, Cruikshank, Mayer, Pintrich, Raths, Wittrock, 2000):

changing the names in the six categories from noun to verb forms

rearranging them as shown in the chart below

creating a processes and levels of knowledge matrix.

This new taxonomy reflects a more active form of thinking and is perhaps more accurate

Bloom's Revised Taxonomy not only improved the usability of it by using action words, but added a cognitive and knowledge matrix.

While Bloom's original cognitive taxonomy did mention three levels of knowledge or products that could be processed, they were not discussed very much and remained one-dimensional.

Factual - The basic elements students must know to be acquainted with a discipline or solve problems.

Conceptual – The interrelationships among the basic elements within a larger structure that enable them to function together.

Procedural - How to do something, methods of inquiry, and criteria for using skills, algorithms, techniques, and methods.

In Krathwohl and Anderson's revised version, the authors combine the cognitive processes with the above three levels of knowledge to form a matrix. In addition, they added another level of knowledge - metacognition:

Metacognitive – Knowledge of cognition in general, as well as awareness and knowledge of one’s own cognition.

When the cognitive and knowledge dimensions are arranged in a matrix, as shown below, it makes a nice performance aid for creating performance objectives: