Terminology Tuesday: Bloom’s Taxonomy

Since the dawn of my days as an Instructional Designer, Bloom’s Taxonomy was pounded into my brain – the military realllllly loves Dr. Benjamin Bloom’s verbs. I made the assumption that everyone in the field of Education had heard of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and you know what assumptions do – they make an A** out of me and you! In developing a model course for faculty members, I initially thought it was too elementary to be discussing Bloom’s Taxonomy with folks holding PhDs in educational fields…that is until I found out that a faculty member had admitted to not knowing what Bloom’s Taxonomy was. SAY WHAAAAT?! So this week, I’m discussing Bloom’s Taxonomy, and maybe you too can become king (or queen) of the verbs!

So way back in the 1950s, Dr. Benjamin Bloom decided that he wanted to move away from simple recall tasks in education – you may remember this as memorizing text book passages and recalling them later in some regurgitated form or another – to him, this wasn’t really a deep form of education. Wanting to foster higher thinking in education, Dr. Bloom came up with classifications of verbs which would be used to write learning objectives.

Bloom’s Taxonomy emphasizes the importance of using the three domains of learning (cognitive, affective, and psychomotor), and if you’ve ever worked within the Defence sector, you will see this translated in Job Task Analyses (JTAs) as knowledge, skills, and attitude – often in a very fancy looking excel spreadsheet that makes your eyes bleed and sucks a little bit of your soul each time you open it.

These verbs were classified into six groups: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. Later on, the taxonomy was revised, with the new groups being: Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating.

But Why Do I Need Verbs!?

Well. Every good training program has a set of learning objectives which outline the goals of the course – or what you should be able to do upon completion of the training program. Now to be good and measurable learning objectives, you must include a verb within the learning objective that seeks to somehow measure what the learner is doing.

For example, say I want the learner to be able to calculate a variable based on a mathematical equation discussed within the course, I may write a learning objective like “Apply your understanding of the Pythagorean Theorem to the length of X.” This is much more measurable than say “Solve for X.” In the latter learning objective, I’m not even telling the learner which formula I expect them to call upon; this is confusing. You want to create clarity within your learning objectives as this outlines clear expectations you have of your learners.

As much as I like to harp on Bloom’s Taxonomy (honestly, it’s been beaten to death with me), it is important for any effective training program. Especially when it comes to assessment. Like I said before, we want to create measurable learning objectives; this means that we need to assess our learner’s knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation (notice a trend here?) of the information presented throughout the training program. Doing so will ensure that our learners successfully achieve the learning objectives (or have all possible chances to do so at least).

You can find some neat visuals for Bloom’s Taxonomy (a few good ones are here, here, and here) – this may help clear up some confusion. And if the visuals don’t help, check out Don Clark’s explanation – it’s a darn good one!