Benjamin Bloom, was a teacher and education researcher who created a new way of understanding the how students learn that focuses on the process of learning, rather than simply the end result, and models inquiry at all levels of learning. He wasn’t interested in the idea of comparing student achievement to other students and preferred focusing helping students with goal attainment
As a teacher, he liked to make learning as real as possible for his students, and as Elliot Eisner, a students of Bloom, states:
His willingness to devote the time in a graduate class to the actual production of an event in order to increase the meaningfulness of the idea of probability was emblematic of what always seemed to me to be a kind of hard-nosed progressivism that characterized his orientation to education and especially to he assessment of the educational consequences he thought important (1).
He is most famous for Bloom’s Taxonomy, which shows that there are six levels of cognitive operations, each measuring a different skill level involved with the learning process. Each level depends on the ability to master the preceding level. Therefore, Bloom’s Taxonomy proves there is a hierarchy intrinsic in cognitive operations and in order to achieve at a high level of cognition, one must first master lower-level cognition. This finding was monumental also in that it provides a framework for building learning objectives for the completion of classroom tasks (3).
Bloom also studied environmental influences which focuses on promoting learning in a way that respects the multitude of learning abilities. Bloom found that learning is achieved through opportunity, effort, and support and is based less on genetic factors, which explains why wealthy individuals are usually high-achievers. Thus, he studied ways to support all learners at their various learning levels and focused on early childhood stages as being the years when support of the learning process is most valuable (4). His theories on giftedness were also unique, as they expressed the idea that all individuals have some kind of giftedness and through proper education, these gifts can be nurtured and developed.
Finally, in the seventies, Bloom took an interest in working to develop learning standards international. In organizing international seminars, he realized that one should take into serious account the environment from which test scores come from before comparing test scores from one culture or country to another (6). Cultural biases and difference must be accounted for in order to attain an accurate understanding of test results.
Works Cited:
Eisner, Elliot . "Benjamin Bloom." International Bureau of Education 30.3 (2000): 1-7.