What is Bloom’s Taxonomy?

In 1956 Benjamin Bloom, an American educational psychologist, and his collaborators published a framework for categorizing educational goals known as Bloom’s taxonomy.

The taxonomy consists of six major categories of thinking: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation.

In this hierarchical framework, each level of learning is a prerequisite for the next level. So, students who function at one level have also mastered the level or levels below it.

For each level, Bloom identified a list of suitable verbs for describing that level.

Here are the 6 categories, their meanings along with the action verbs for each level.

1. Knowledge: This entails remembering learned material, and calling upon a wide range of materials.
Define, recite, name, choose, recall, list, indicate, label, match.
2. Comprehension: It’s the ability to grasp the meaning of previously learned material.
Explain, summarize, paraphrase, restate, interpret, compare, contrast.
3. Application: It’s the ability to use learned material in new and concrete situations. This may include the application of rules, methods, concepts, etc.
Apply, develop, incorporate, solve, use, plan, demonstrate, organize, and produce.
4. Analysis: This is the ability to break down the material into its parts to understand its organization. This may include the identification of the parts, analysis of the relationship between parts, and recognition of the organizational principles involved.
Analyse, criticize, examine, illustrate, relate, categorize.
5. Synthesis: The ability to put parts together to form a new whole. For example, writing a research proposal, thesis, etc.
Compose, design, write, and revise.
6. Evaluation: The ability to judge the value of material for a given purpose according to specific criteria.
Assess, judge, justify, measure, defend, convince, and support.

In 2001, a former student of Bloom and others published a new version of the taxonomy to better fit educational practices of the 21st century.

The six categories were changed from nouns to verbs because verbs describe actions and thinking is an active process (See figure below).

Why use Bloom’s Taxonomy?

Bloom’s taxonomy can serve educators, course designers, and faculty members because it explains the process of learning: How students proceed from lower to higher-order thinking.

Indeed, this taxonomy can be useful for:
• planning and delivering appropriate instruction since it helps teachers set learning objectives;
• clarifying for students what’s expected from them;
• course design because the different levels can help you move students through the process of learning: from the most fundamental remembering and understanding to the more complex synthesising and evaluating ;
• understanding students’ abilities;
• aligning appropriately instruction and assessment with the intended learning outcomes.

How to use Bloom’s Taxonomy?

You can apply Bloom’s taxonomy to help your students advance to more complex levels of thinking. Here are 4 ways to apply it in your teaching.

1) Writing clear learning objectives

Learning objectives or intended student learning outcomes are statements that describe the desired learning that students should have acquired and should be able to demonstrate at the end of a course or study programme.

They identify what students should know and be able to do as a result of completing this course/programme. Therefore, these statements should clearly articulate the intended knowledge, skills, abilities, competencies, attitudes, and values that characterize the essential learning required of the course.

Bloom’s taxonomy can help you specify the level, criteria, or standards for the knowledge, skills, abilities, competencies, attitudes, or values that your students are expected to be able to demonstrate.

You can move from simple to complex, the concrete to abstract, according to the ability of your students.

Following the order of learning objectives, you can write clearly your statements as follows :
Students will be able to+ verb (desired action or performance)+ object + optional modifiers (conditions or targeted learning descriptors).

For instance, your students may need first to understand a concept before applying it: Students will be able to describe the history of American immigration policy.

Use those action verbs that are aligned with each level in Bloom’s Taxonomy to write your objectives. These will make your objectives capable of being measured by more than one assessment tool, instrument, or metric.

2) Planning appropriate instruction

Bloom’s taxonomy can also guide you to plan for your instruction throughout the different lesson stages. So, you know how to proceed to develop students’ thinking skills: from fundamental to more complex skills such as analysing and evaluating.

However, using this taxonomy does not necessarily mean starting always with lower-order thinking skills and going through the entire taxonomy for each concept you present in your class.

Your students might have already developed foundational knowledge that relates to your content. So, they know about those concepts and how to apply them, but they need to be stretched to develop higher-order thinking skills.

Therefore, you should consider your students’ learning needs before you decide which level of Bloom’s taxonomy you need to start with and which one to focus on and reinforce more in your teaching.

Use Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to explore your students’ needs.

3) Posing the right questions

Our questions can pose different cognitive demands on our students. Some require much thinking and time while others can be a matter of memory and recall.

So, it’s important to know what kind of questions we need to pose at each stage of our lesson to support our students to learn better. This makes our questioning more strategic.

You can use Bloom’s taxonomy to plan for your questions more effectively.

This will support you to know the kind of questions you need to pose at the beginning, during, and at the end of your lesson.

Closed questions are used for knowledge and comprehension. For instance :
• What have we seen so far?
• What does this mean?
• Describe what happened.
• How many..? Who/where/which ….?
• What do you know about…?

Address these types of questions at the beginning of the lesson to activate students’ prior knowledge and assess their understanding of previous lessons.

Also, use these questions to check for students’ understanding during and at the end of your lesson.

Open questions (have more than one answer) are used for application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. For instance :
• How could you use this …?
• What would happen if…?
• Can you identify the main idea/character/events…?
• What solutions would you recommend to…?
• What do you think about..?
• To what extent do you agree/disagree with…?
• How would you defend your position?

Unlike closed questions, open questions pose higher cognitive demands on students. So, ask them to get your students to think about the content they’re studying.

4) Differentiating your lessons

Bloom’s taxonomy can also be used to design flexible content that allows for differentiation.

You can provide an extra challenge for early finishers and expand on tasks for those ready to go further.

Advanced students can work on more challenging tasks. So, you can assign tasks that develop higher-order thinking skills.

Using Bloom’s taxonomy, you can also plan for a variety of tasks within the same level or category.

For instance, if most students need to understand the lesson’s concept you can assign different tasks with the same aim, using those associated verbs.

Students can choose from a variety of tasks to summarize, paraphrase, explain, match statements, list items or define concepts.

So, Bloom’s taxonomy can help you differentiate your lessons, thereby stimulating students’ interest and maximizing more learning opportunities.

To conclude, these are some of the ways to use Bloom’s taxonomy in teaching. Think always about your students’ needs and what should be done to close any existing learning gap. This taxonomy can help you achieve this goal.