This is a detailed guide to help draw out instructional goals created by Benjamin Bloom and his collaborators Edward Furst, Max Englehart, David Krathwohl, and Walter Hill. It includes a list of objectives that are educational. These objectives are organized in a hierarchical order of skills in different domains to help teachers teach, and their students learn efficiently. Each of these domains is further subdivided to indicate different levels of learning. As each domain is hierarchical, the students need to move through them one step at a time. In other words, they can’t jump to a new level without completing the preceding one. This is a significant feature of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Interestingly, Bloom’s Taxonomy can help all kinds of learners and tries to meet an enormous compilation of learning requirements. The framework consists of six chief categories:
- Knowledge: It involves the teachers trying to determine if the students can recognize and recall information.
- Comprehension: At this stage, the teacher wants the students to be capable of arranging or, in some way, organizing information.
- Application: Here, the teacher starts using abstractions to explain particular situations or ideas.
- Analysis: This level is where the teacher starts to scrutinize elements and the relationships between elements or the functional organizational principles that act as a firm basis for or provide support to an idea.
- Synthesis: This stage is where the teacher starts helping students put conceptual parts or elements together to develop abstract relationships or some new plan of operation.
- Evaluation: This level is where the teacher helps students comprehend the intricacy of ideas so that they can identify how facts and concepts are either consistent rationally or developed illogically.
While each category has subcategories, all positioned along a continuum from concrete to abstract and simple to complex, Bloom’s Taxonomy is commonly remembered as stated by the six chief categories.
Bloom’s Taxonomy is a suitable way to explain the degree to which teachers want their students to comprehend and use concepts, display specific skills, and have their attitudes, values, and interests affected. It’s crucial for teachers to decide the levels of student expertise they expect their students to accomplish because this will determine which classroom evaluation techniques are most suitable for the course.
Though the most common type of classroom assessment that introductory college courses use are multiple-choice tests, which could be pretty adequate for evaluating knowledge and comprehension, they often fall short when assessing students’ knowledge at the advanced levels of synthesis and evaluation. This is where Bloom’s Taxonomy can help. From letting teachers organize and gather information in a methodical manner, setting up a series of goals that students can aspire to accomplish, and creating a range of uniform and personalized assignments and assessments, it can help in all these and much more.
Bloom’s Taxonomy can even be employed iteratively to state and refine course goals at first. Then, teachers can finally use it to classify which classroom evaluation techniques are most suitable for measuring these goals.
