What Do You Want Students to Actually Be Able to Do? Bloom's Taxonomy

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What Do You Want Students to Actually Be Able to Do? Bloom's Taxonomy

Educational Psychology · Chapter 9: Instructional Strategies and Effective Teaching PracticeSection 9.4 · lesson 86 of 1009 min · free with a free account

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In this lesson

Bloom's Taxonomy, the 2001 revision, and writing objectives that mean something.

  • Name the six levels of the revised taxonomy in order
  • Explain what Anderson and Krathwohl changed
  • Write objectives using the ABCD model
  • Target higher-order thinking deliberately

Transcript

Everything said in the video, section by section (1,093 words). Read along, or search it.

Instructional Strategies and Effective Teaching Practice

What Do You Want Students to Be Able to Do?

Most learning objectives are written with verbs that cannot be observed. Students will understand the causes of the war. How would you ever know whether that happened? Bloom's Taxonomy exists to fix exactly that problem. We start with the original taxonomy from nineteen fifty-six. Then the two thousand one revision, and what it changed. Then the six levels, from remembering through to creating. Then the ABCD model for writing objectives that are testable. And one research finding that surprises most teachers. Teaching higher-order thinking improves recall test scores too. Not just performance on the complex tasks you would expect.

1956

A Common Language for Learning Goals

Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues published the original taxonomy. The Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, in nineteen fifty-six. The goal was to give educators a common language. A shared way of describing learning goals and outcomes. It organized cognitive objectives into six hierarchical levels. Knowledge, comprehension, and application. Then analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Each level was presumed to require mastery of the one before it. That framework reached extraordinarily far. For decades it guided curriculum design and assessment writing. And instructional planning, across every level of education.

2001

What Anderson and Krathwohl Changed

In two thousand one, the taxonomy was significantly revised. Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl published that revision. They made three changes worth knowing. First, they renamed the categories using active verbs. Remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. Second, they repositioned the top two levels. Synthesis became create, and was placed at the apex. Evaluate moved down to the penultimate level. Third, they added an entire second dimension. The knowledge dimension, distinguishing four kinds of knowledge. Factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive. That first change sounds cosmetic, and it is not. A verb names something a student can be observed doing.

Lower Three

Remember, Understand, Apply

Take the six levels in order, starting with the lower three. Remember involves retrieving knowledge from long-term memory. Recalling facts, listing terms, or identifying information. Understand means constructing meaning from information. Summarizing, classifying, paraphrasing, or explaining concepts. There is a clean test for the line between those two. Remembering reproduces the words you were given. Understanding produces different words carrying the same meaning. Apply requires using learned procedures or concepts in a situation. Solving a problem with a known formula, for example. Or demonstrating a skill in a new context.

Higher Three

Analyze, Evaluate, Create

Now the higher three, which are where the difficulty lives. Analyze involves breaking material into its components. And then examining the relationships between them. Distinguishing relevant from irrelevant information. Or differentiating cause from effect. Evaluate is making judgments based on criteria and standards. Critiquing a research design, or defending a position. Or assessing the validity of an argument. Create involves putting elements together to form a novel whole. Designing an experiment, or composing an original piece. Or constructing a genuinely new solution. Tasks at that level require the most sophisticated integration. You cannot assemble something new without controlling every level beneath.

Six Levels

Verbs, and What They Ask a Student to Do

Each level has characteristic verbs, which is what makes it usable. At remember, the verbs are list, define, recall, identify. A task might be: name five causes of the First World War. At understand, the verbs are explain, summarize, classify. Explain those same causes in your own words. At apply, the verbs are solve, demonstrate, use. Apply economic theory to a modern conflict. At analyze, the verbs are compare, differentiate, examine. Compare the causes of the two world wars. At evaluate, the verbs are critique, justify, assess. Judge which cause was most significant, and defend that judgment. And at create, the verbs are design, compose, construct. Design a peace treaty that addresses the root causes.

Objectives

The ABCD Model

So how do you write an objective that is actually usable? A good objective communicates precisely what students will do. What they will be able to do as a result of instruction. Effective objectives contain four components. They are sometimes remembered as the ABCD model. A is audience. Who is this objective about? B is behavior. An observable action verb. C is condition. Under what circumstances? And D is degree. To what standard? Bloom's taxonomy supplies the verbs for that behavior component. And those verbs signal the cognitive level required. Which is how an objective and an assessment stay aligned.

The Gap

Higher-Order Thinking Is Underrepresented

There is a persistent gap in how the taxonomy gets used. Higher-order objectives are often underrepresented. Those at the analyze, evaluate and create levels. Underrepresented in classroom instruction, and in assessment. Now here is the finding that should change that. Research consistently shows something counter-intuitive. Students in classrooms targeting higher-order thinking perform better. Better on complex tasks, which is what you would expect. But also better on foundational recall tests. The mechanism behind that is worth understanding. The act of analyzing and creating forces consolidation. Students organize their lower-level knowledge more robustly.

Why It Matters

Fragile Knowledge Versus Flexible Knowledge

Think about what memorization alone actually produces. When students only memorize and recall, knowledge stays fragile. It is held in fragile, context-specific ways. It works in the setting where it was learned, and nowhere else. Now consider what the higher levels demand instead. Asking students to analyze, evaluate and create forces reorganization. They have to connect knowledge that was previously separate. The result is flexible, transferable understanding. There is a practical test for whether that has happened. Does the understanding survive the test itself? And does it then serve the student in real life? That is the whole argument for climbing the taxonomy.

Classroom Example

Rewriting One Quiz Question

One example shows how small a change this can be. A biology teacher revises a single quiz question. The original question was: name the parts of a cell. That sits at the remember level, and nowhere higher. Here is the revised version of the same question. Given an unknown organism's cellular structure, identify whether it is prokaryotic or eukaryotic. And justify your reasoning. That now spans analyze and evaluate. The revised question requires deeper processing from the student. And it produces more useful assessment data for the teacher. Because the justification shows how the student reasoned.

Key Idea

Precise Verbs Are Not Paperwork

One last point about why this is worth doing carefully. Writing objectives with precise Bloom's-level verbs is not paperwork. It is not a bureaucratic exercise, however it can feel. It forces teachers to be clear about what they actually want. Clear about exactly what students should learn. And it provides the foundation for aligned assessment. Consider a teacher who assesses only at the lowest two levels. Remember, and understand, and nothing beyond. That assessment has a specific blind spot. It cannot detect whether students can use any of the material. The fix is not to throw out the recall questions. It is to make sure the higher levels appear as well.

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FAQ

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About What Do You Want Students to Actually Be Able to Do? Bloom's Taxonomy

What are the six levels of Bloom's revised taxonomy in order?
The six levels of the revised Bloom's taxonomy, from lowest to highest, are remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate and create. Remember means retrieving facts, understand means constructing meaning, and apply means using a procedure in a situation. Analyze breaks material into parts, evaluate judges it against criteria, and create puts elements together into a new whole, such as designing an experiment.
How did Anderson and Krathwohl revise Bloom's taxonomy?
In 2001, Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl renamed the categories as verbs, placed create (formerly synthesis) at the top with evaluate just below it, and added a knowledge dimension of factual, conceptual, procedural and metacognitive knowledge. The original 1956 taxonomy by Benjamin Bloom and colleagues listed knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Using verbs makes each level observable.
What is the ABCD model for writing learning objectives?
The ABCD model says a learning objective should name the Audience, the Behavior as an observable action verb, the Condition under which it is performed, and the Degree or standard required. For example: given a table of ten test scores, seventh graders will calculate the mean with no errors. Bloom's verbs supply the behavior and signal the cognitive level, which keeps objectives and assessments aligned.
Does teaching higher-order thinking improve basic recall?
Yes, research shows that students in classrooms targeting higher-order thinking do better on complex tasks and also on foundational recall tests. Analyzing, evaluating and creating force students to connect and reorganize what they know, which consolidates lower-level knowledge into flexible, transferable understanding. Memorization alone tends to leave knowledge fragile and tied to the context where it was learned.

About the Educational Psychology course

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Educational Psychology (Psychology 120) carries a NCCRS credit recommendation for 3 semester credits. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.
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