eLearning Guild Research: Reconsidering Bloom’s Taxonomy (Old AND New)

Bloom’s Taxonomy. Is thereanything so familiar to people throughout the learning field as this pyramid withknowledge at the bottom and evaluation at the top? Most people engaged in thedesign of instruction, whether instructional designers, trainers, educators,instructors, faculty, or subject matter experts, have probably been drilled inusing Bloom’s familiar pyramid and verbs to write learning objectives.

Yet, our notions about the designof instruction have changed since Bloom’s Taxonomy came out in the 1950s. Cansomething from that era still be relevant with our new understandings aboutlearning and in the age of mobile learning and augmented reality?

The Guild examines original and revised Bloom’s taxonomies

The eLearning Guild’s newresearch report, Bloom’s Taxonomy: What’s Old Is New Againdiscusses the history and revisions of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and examines its usein all facets of education and instruction and why it has endured despite numerouscriticisms. It also includes numerous job aids, such as Figure 1, to helppractitioners better use Bloom’s in their own settings.

Figure 1:  Bloom’s taxonomystaircase (Source: ftp://ftp-fc.sc.egov.usda.gov/NEDC/isd/taxonomy.pdf)

In Figure 1, the stairs representthe cognitive levels in Bloom’s original taxonomy, arranged in ascending order.Above each step is a list of suggested activities for that level. Below eachstep is a list of the verbs that we commonly used to create learningobjectives.

What many people don’t know is that Benjamin Bloom neverintended to generate instructional dogma. He actually intended his work for anarrow audience: assessment experts developing new ways to measure what collegestudents learned. But he was glad that it helped make an important shift in educators’focus from teaching to learning.

In 2001, Lorin Anderson andcollaborators published a revised version: ATaxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomyof Educational Objectives. Andersonwas a student of Bloom’s. One of Anderson’scollaborators, David Krathwohl, worked with Bloom on the original taxonomy.  Among the reasons for the update was inclusionof new understanding of learning and new methods of instruction.

How the new taxonomy is different

Figure 2 shows the most obvious difference between theoriginal and revised versions. In the revised taxonomy, evaluation is no longerthe highest level of the pyramid. A new category, creating, is at the top. Anothersignificant change is that category names are no longer nouns, but verbs, so objectivesare meant to describe learners’ thinking processes rather than behaviors.

Bloom’s Original Taxonomy	Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy

Figure 2: Bloom’s original and revised taxonomies

The revised taxonomy arranges skills from most basic to mostcomplex. The new version has two dimensions—knowledge and cognitiveprocesses—and the subcategories within each dimension are more extensive andspecific (Figure 3). The report explains how the two-dimensional taxonomy isused to build performance-based objectives. You’ll want to read this partbecause it will help you build much more targeted objectives.

Figure3: Taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: a revision of Bloom’sTaxonomy of Educational Objectives
(Source: Iowa State University Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching;https:// www.celt.iastate.edu/pdfs-docs/teaching/RevisedBloomsHandout.pdf) 

In 2007, Andrew Churches updated Bloom’s work again by introducingBloom’s Digital Taxonomy. His intent was to marry Bloom’s cognitive levels to21st-century digital skills.

For example, for the top of the revised taxonomy, creating, learnersmight:

• Develop a script for a video
• Construct an eBook
• Develop a podcast

Details support digital literacy

Digital literacy is critical in today’s world, so we don’tuse technology just to use it but to develop the skills to live and work successfully.Although we may map a tool to a specific level of the hierarchy, we cancertainly use tools at more than one cognitive level. The author, CeceliaMunzenmaier, explains this in more detail in the report.

Bloom’swork continues to inspire attention, revisions, applications, research, anddiscussion. It shapes instructional practice and is a widely accepted metric.Bloom’s influence has certainly stood the test of time.