Bloom's Taxonomy - An Overview

Introduction to Bloom’s Taxonomy

In 1956, Benjamin Bloom worked in partnership with Max Engelhart, Edward Furst, Walter Hill, and David Krathwohl to publish Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, which is otherwise referred to as Bloom’s Taxonomy (Armstrong, n.d.).  This framework for categorizing educational goals, which has been applied for numerous decades not only by teachers from kindergarten through 12^th grade but also college/university instructors in their teachings, encompasses six main categories: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluations (Armstrong, n.d.).  However, in 2001, a revision was made to Bloom’s Taxonomy by a collective of cognitive psychologists, curriculum theorists, instructional researchers, and testing and assessment specialists, which was published as A Taxonomy for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and focused more on the cognitive processes associated with knowledge (Armstrong, n.d.).  There are six major categories with each of them having between two to seven subcategories, which are the following (Armstrong, n.d.):

1.     Remember:  Recognizing and Recalling

2.     Understand:  Interpreting, Exemplifying, Classifying, Summarizing, Inferring, Comparing, and Explaining

3.     Apply:  Executing and Implementing

4.     Analyze:  Differentiating, Organizing, and Attributing

5.     Evaluate:  Checking and Critiquing

6.     Create:  Generating, Planning, and Producing

Below is a graphic of the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, which notes the six major categories and a short description for each category (Armstrong, n.d.).

Reference

Armstrong, P. (n.d.). Bloom’s Taxonomy. Retrieved from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/#2001