Health care educators have been using Bloom’s taxonomy for
decades to build goals and objectives. The original levels cited by Bloom
inlcude — come on, recite them with me now — knowledge, comprehension,
application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
The trouble is, I keep hearing bright, competent, high-level
educators still using those terms.
Ruh-roh.
Yep, that’s right, the taxonomy being cited over and over
again, on lesson plans and course syllabi, at faculty meetings and educational
conferences — including one I just returned from — are woefully outdated.
Here, then, is a reasonably quick update on the “new”
changes to Bloom’s original taxonomy.
Basic changes
Anderson and Krathwohl led an interdisciplinary team of
experts in cognitive psychology, educational testing, and curriculum and
instruction. The team worked to bring to Bloom’s innovative framework greater
relevance to modern education.
The most obvious but perhaps least important changes that
came out of that effort occurred in the language used for the levels of
learning. The diagram below compares the levels in the original and revised versions.
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| Click to enlarge. |
The revision team decided on using verbs instead of nouns to
label the levels. It also did a bit of rearranging of levels to make the
hierarchy more conceptually consistent.
The real changes, though, go much deeper than swapping nouns
for gerunds.
Core change
The revised taxonomy restructures Bloom’s straightforward
but one-dimensional language into a more complex, multi-layered one. The new
taxonomy incorporates — intersects, if you will — different
types of knowledge at each level of learning. Those types of knowledge
include factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive (below).
Now, it’s beyond the scope of this post, not to mention my
own rather limited knowledge in this area, to delve into every level and type
of knowledge. I will, however, point you to some outstanding resources (listed
at the bottom) that show far better than I could how much more robust and
useful the revised taxonomy is than the original.
Here’s hoping that this info will help you revise your own
syllabi and lesson plans to include the brandy-spanking new, nearly 12-year-old
taxonomy from our dear, departed friend, Dr. Benjamin Samuel Bloom (1913–1999).
Resources
- Wonderful explanation of the differences, by Dr. Leslie Owen Wilson
- Great faculty development resource page at Northern Illinois University
- Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy, a fascinating update for the digital age
- Tips for writing objectives from Oregan State University
- Fantastic content and interactive graphic on building learning objectives
- Well-documented wiki by Mary Forehand at the University of Georgia
Lists of verbs for the revised taxonomy
- From Teachers.net (Word document)
- From University of Tennessee
- From The Reading Sage
