Bloom's Taxonomy
Bloom's Taxonomy
The updated version of Bloom’s Taxonomy provides a unique framework for designing course content and illustrates the cognitive skills and general types of knowledge that instructors should target when developing learning activities and assessments.
In Bloom’s revised framework, skills are classified on a continuum of increasing cognitive complexity and include remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Skills relevant to creating, evaluating, and analyzing require students to develop a deeper understanding of content, successfully integrate prior knowledge with new information, and categorize ideas as well as generate original ideas. In contrast, skills relevant to remembering, understanding, and applying, develop the building blocks for the foundational knowledge students eventually use in more complex tasks.
When developing course content using Bloom’s Taxonomy as a tool, it can be helpful to work backward from the instructional outcomes that will be required of students, and then write course objectives using the verbs associated with the appropriate cognitive skills needed to complete assessments and activities. A well-designed course will include a mix of assessments and activities that draw on a range of cognitive skills. Using this backward design method can help instructors develop learning objectives that help focus students on the desired outcomes as well as provide more direction for students who will eventually need to show the instructor what they have learned. Paired with a rubric for an assessment, course learning objectives that use words aligned with specific cognitive skills can provide important guidance to improve outcomes.
| Skill | Definition | Learning Objective Verbs |
|---|---|---|
| Create | Putting elements together to form an original whole, reorganizing elements into something new | design, formulate, build, invent, create, compose, generate, derive, modify, develop |
| Evaluate | Making judgments based on criteria and standards, judging the value or accuracy of ideas, data, concepts, and information | choose, support, relate, determine, defend, judge, compare, contrast, argue, justify, support, convince |
| Analyze | Breaking material into constituent parts, determining how the parts relate to each other | classify, break down, categorize, analyze, diagram, illustrate, criticize, simplify, associate |
| Apply | Apply facts, ideas, concepts, and rules | calculate, predict, apply, solve, illustrate, use, demonstrate, determine, model, perform, present |
| Understand | Constructing meaning from oral, written, and graphic information by interpreting, classifying, summarizing, and explaining | describe, explain, paraphrase, restate, give original examples of, summarize, contrast, interpret, discuss |
| Remember | Retrieving and recalling facts from long-term memory | list, outline, define, name, match, quote, recall, identify, label, recognize |
In addition to the six core cognitive skills in the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, skills can also be viewed using one of four knowledge dimensions: factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive knowledge. These four knowledge dimensions of each skill allow a deeper dive into course content, giving the instructor another tool with which to analyze course learning.