Bloom’s Taxonomy, developed by Benjamin Bloom and other educational psychologists in 1956, is a system for understanding how people learn. Bloom and his colleagues identified three domains for learning:
Cognitive: Mental skills
Affective: Feelings or emotional areas
Psychomotor: Manual or physical skills
Bloom’s Taxonomy is recognized as an effective and important tool in the field of learning design and education. Using the three domains in the taxonomy, instructors can design learning events and activities that promote a progression of learning from rudimentary knowledge acquisition to a deeper, or higher, level of learning.
The cognitive domain of Bloom’s Taxonomy classifications
In your course, you can design educational content using the cognitive domain of Bloom’s Taxonomy. The cognitive domain, as described in Bloom’s Taxonomy, includes six levels of learning:
Knowledge: At this level, students can remember previously learned material, such as definitions, concepts, principles, or formulas.
Comprehension: At this level, students can understand the meaning of learned material and recognize information in new and previously unseen examples.
Application: At this level, students can apply learned information in a new and concrete situation or context to solve a problem, answer a question, perform another task, or apply abstract information in a concrete situation. The information may be rules, principles, formulas, theories, concepts, or procedures.
Analysis: At this level, students can break an item into its constituent elements or parts and explain the relationship between the parts.
Synthesis: At this level, students can put parts together to form
a new whole, pattern, or structure.
Evaluation: At this level, students can use a set of criteria to judge the appropriateness of an object plan or design for a specific purpose.
Bloom’s Taxonomy and online education
The cognitive domain in Bloom’s Taxonomy is particularly well-suited to the online educational experience, which differs from the classroom experience in that face-to-face communication is limited or,
in some cases, nonexistent. The absence of visual, verbal, auditory, and other forms of face-to-face feedback between students and instructors means that online educational content must be presented clearly and unambiguously. This requirement mitigates situations in which instructors are not immediately available to respond to student confusion or questions.
Bloom’s Taxonomy assists in clarifying online educational content by:
Systematic progression of learning outcomes: Bloom’s characterizes learning outcomes in rank order from lowest to highest, with each outcome prerequisite to those above it. As with learning to crawl before walking, students following Bloom’s Taxonomy systematically master lower levels of content to progress to the next higher level. Rigorous application of this method helps to eliminate confusion and brings necessary clarity to the online educational experience.
Alignment of learning objectives, content, and assessment: Bloom’s provides a template for precisely defining learning objectives, and then aligning those learning objectives with instructional content and mastery testing, so that each element in the online learning experience ”makes sense” to students. A learning objective at the Knowledge level correlates to content and mastery testing at that same level. Learning objectives at the Evaluation level correlate to content and mastery testing at the same level, but are preceded by, and build on, learning objectives, content, and testing at the preceding learning levels of Knowledge through Synthesis. In this way, students clearly understand learning expectations and receive instructional and assessment content that meets those expectations.
Behavioral, outcome-based instructional and assessment content: Bloom's provides the tools for designing instructional content based on clearly defined learning objectives that inform behavioral, or skills-based learning outcomes. This is particularly important in the online educational environment because student successes or failures are unambiguous with respect to online assessment interactions.
The following table details how Bloom's Taxonomy might apply to a class on communication management. Notice that the objectives move in a logical progression from the lower to higher levels of learning, allowing students to master each level in preparation for the next. Note, too, that the learning objectives are clear, measurable, and inform observable behavioral outcomes.
Bloom's Classification
Level
Learning Objective
Knowledge Level
Match communication styles with their definitions.
Comprehension Level
Identify the type of communication style from scenario-based examples.
Application Level
Apply the appropriate communication style with individuals who have varying communication styles.
Analysis Level
Predict outcomes of interpersonal interactions based on an analysis of participants' communication styles and responses.
Synthesis Level
Design a new communication model that incorporates methods appropriate to given circumstances and populations.
Evaluation Level
Evaluate the success or failure of a given communication model among a specified population.