Benjamin Bloom

THEORY

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a classification system developed in 1956 by education psychologist Benjamin Bloom to categorize intellectual skills and behavior important to learning. Bloom identified six cognitive levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, with sophistication growing from basic knowledge-recall skills to the highest level, evaluation.

Bloom’s Taxonomy was created in 1948 by psychologist Benjamin Bloom and several colleagues. Originally developed as a method of classifying educational goals for student performance evaluation, Bloom’s Taxonomy has been revised over the years and is still utilized in education today. The original intent in creating the taxonomy was to focus on three major domains of learning: cognitive, affect, and psycho motor. The cognitive domain covered “the recall or recognition of knowledge and the development of intellectual abilities and skills”; the affect domain covered “changes in interest, attitudes, and values, and the development of appreciations and adequate adjustment”; and the psycho motor domain encompassed “the manipulative or motor-skill area.”¹ Despite the creators’ intent to address all three domains, Bloom’s Taxonomy applies only to acquiring knowledge in the cognitive domain, which involves intellectual skill development.

The original Bloom’s Taxonomy contained six developmental categories: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The first step in the taxonomy focused on knowledge acquisition and at this level, students recall, memorize, list, and repeat information. In the second tier, students classify, describe, discuss, identify, and explain information. Next, students demonstrate, interpret, and write about what they're learned and solve problems. In the subsequent step, students compare, contrast, distinguish, and examine what they've learned with other information, and they have the opportunity to question and test this knowledge. Then students argue, defend, support, and evaluate their opinion on this information.

In the 1990s, one of Bloom’s students, Lorin Anderson, revised the original taxonomy. In the amended version of Bloom’s Taxonomy, the names of the major cognitive process categories were changed to indicate action because thinking implies active engagements. Instead of listing knowledge as a part of the taxonomy, the category is divided into different types of knowledge: factual, conceptual, procedural, and meta cognitive. This newer taxonomy also moves the evaluation stage down a level and the highest element becomes “creating.”