Bloom's Taxonomy • Educational Renaissance

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a way of ordering and organizing educational goals that was developed in the 1950s. A committee of American college and university examiners, headed by Benjamin S. Bloom, the University Examiner at the University of Chicago, set out on a project to classify the educational objectives of teachers. Their purpose was to create clarity for teachers, examiners and curriculum writers about what exactly teachers and courses were aim to accomplish.

In doing so they drew from teachers’ own language about educational goals, refined and standardized it, and aimed to do so from a standpoint of neutrality, so that their taxonomy could be used by educators from different schools of thought. The idea of a taxonomy, or hierarchical organization of categories was drawn from the biological sciences. The appeal of making advances in education as a modern social science based on an analogy with the hard sciences was particularly strong at this time in higher education circles.

Bloom and his colleagues initially proposed three domains of educational objectives: the cognitive domain, the affective domain, and the psychomotor. The Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals: Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain was published in 1956 and laid out six categories of objectives for the cognitive domain.

Bloom’s Taxonomy of Six Categories of Objectives in the Cognitive Domain

Knowledge

1.1 Knowledge of Specifics

1.2 Knowledge of Ways and Means of Dealing with Specifics

1.3 Knowledge of the Universals and Abstractions in a Field

Comprehension

2.1 Translation

2.2 Interpretation

2.3 Extrapolation

Application
Analysis

4.1 Analysis of Elements

4.2 Analysis of Relationships

4.3 Analysis of Organizational Principles

Synthesis

5.1 Production of a Unique Communication

5.2 Production of a Plan, or Proposed Set of Operations

5.3 Derivation of a Set of Abstract Relations

Evaluation

6.1 Judgments in Terms of Internal Evidence

6.2 Judgments in Terms of External Criteria

The Affective and Psychomotor Domains

The volume on the affective domain was published in 1964, but did not receive anywhere near the amount of attention as the cognitive domain. The categories enumerated were receiving, responding, valuing, organizing and categorizing. The psychomotor domain was never detailed by Bloom and his colleagues, but other educators since the 1970s have proposed their own taxonomies.

In essence, while Bloom’s taxonomy tipped its hat to the importance of the affective and psychomotor domains its influence has largely been in the cognitive domain. It has thereby participated in the modern valuing of isolated cognitive skills over holistic human formation.

Revising Bloom’s Taxonomy

Bloom’s taxonomy is virtually ubiquitous in contemporary educational circles. Colorful charts and diagrams of Bloom’s taxonomy abound on the internet, especially on teacher websites. Many reflect the revision published by a group of cognitive psychologists, curriculum theorists and instructional researchers in 2001, which renamed and slightly restructured the 6 major objectives of the cognitive domain.

Bloom’s taxonomy has become one of those fixed touchpoints in contemporary education that simply falls into the assumed architecture of the discipline. Everyone accepts Bloom’s or revised Bloom’s. Everyone implicitly practices Bloom’s methodology when they identify learning objectives, whether for their course, unit plan or an individual lesson. Virtually no one, as best as I can judge, has actually read the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals: Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain. Nor has anyone seriously questioned the underlying assumptions on which it is based.

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Critiquing Bloom’s Taxonomy and Offering an Alternative

The lecture series above covers the same content as the articles listed below. First, we address how Bloom’s taxonomy interacts with the broader question of the purpose of education. Then, we unpack the good, the bad and the ugly of Bloom’s taxonomy. Lastly, we look at what Bloom’s Taxonomy left out, that a more holistic philosophy of intellectual virtues, as we find in Aristotle, would have included.