CSUN QUICK TUTORIALS: TSENG COLLEGE1

Bloom’s Taxonomy

Recommended Readings

  1. Anderson, L.W., Krathwohl, D.R., eds. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: a revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives; abridged edition. NY: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.
  2. Revised Bloom's Taxonomy Link

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Introduction

Bloom’s taxonomy is a well-known model for thinking about student learning outcomes. It was originally developed by Benjamin Bloom in the 1950’s. He developed it with a committee of educators whose goal was to create a classification system for learning objectives. The concept of developing learning objectives to describe student learning is widely adapted for a variety of learning environments.

Originally Bloom’s taxonomy consisted of the following levels:

CSUN QUICK TUTORIALS: TSENG COLLEGE1

Cognitive:

  • Knowledge
  • Comprehension
  • Application
  • Analysis
  • Synthesis
  • Evaluation

Affective:

  • Receiving
  • Responding
  • Valuing
  • Organizing
  • Characterizing

Psychomotor:

  • Perception
  • Set
  • Guided Response
  • Mechanism
  • Complex overt response
  • Adaptation
  • Origination

CSUN QUICK TUTORIALS: TSENG COLLEGE1

Revision to Bloom’s

Recently, with the advent of new media and considerable discussion about the taxonomy, a new version of Bloom’s Taxonomy was developed. In this version the levels moved from nouns to verbs and a new top level, creating, was proposed. It is commonly depicted in the following graphic.

Figure 1.Diagrammatic Representation of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Thinking

HLWIKI International.(2013). Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Retrieved and revised from HLWIKI International

Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy

Commonly, Bloom’s taxonomy is applied by identifying verbs that are related to the specific levels, writing objectives or questions that reflect the action.These are usually the kind of thinking that the student will be asked to engage in. Common verbs that are associated with the various levels are listed in the following table. The Green areas are the revisions while the Red areas are the original Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Table 1. Bloom’s Taxonomy Revised

Cognitive Domain / Verbs – some examples… (The student will…):
Remembering / Identify, define, memorize, tell, copy, recite, record, label, match, and quote.
Understanding / Summarize, paraphrase, relate, cite, convert, describe, explain, interpret, classify, and indicate.
Applying / Experiment, sketch, construct, prepare, report, implement, manipulate, complete, solve, and apply.
Analyzing / Compare, contrast, differentiate, prioritize, investigate, deconstruct, discriminate, calculate, analyze, and correlate.
Evaluating / Criticize, judge, evidence, support, defend, predict, argue, hypothesize, critique, and evaluate.
Creating / Generate, design, construct, plan, compose, create, write, modify, compile, and produce.