Bloom’s Taxonomy defines different learning objectives that are important in pedagogical exchanges so that educators and students can match their expectations on the purpose of any exchange. For educators, it helps to design the appropriate strategies, tasks and instructions, so that the intended outcome is met. For students, it helps to clarify the objectives of taking a course.

Original Taxonomy

First published in 1956, Bloom’s Taxonomy categorizes educational goals in six major categories:

  • Knowledge (remember) “[…] involves the recall of specifics and universals, the recall of methods and processes, or the recall of a pattern, structure, or setting. This involves little more than bringing to mind the appropriate material.”
  • Comprehension (understand) “[…] represents the lowest level of understanding. It refers to a type of understanding or apprehension such that the individual knows what is being communicated and can make use of the material or idea being communicated without necessarily relating it to other material or seeing its fullest implications.”
  • Application (apply) involves the “use of abstractions in particular and concrete situations. The abstractions may be in the form of general ideas, rules of procedures, or generalized methods. The abstractions may also be technical principles, ideas, and theories which must be remembered and applied.”
  • Analysis (analyse) includes the “breakdown of a communication into its constituent elements or parts such that the relative hierarchy of ideas is made clear and/or the relations between ideas expressed are made explicit.”
  • Synthesis (evaluate) includes “the putting together of elements and parts so as to form a whole. This involves the process of working with pieces, parts, elements, etc., and arranging and combining them in such a way as to constitute a pattern or structure not clearly there before.”
  • Evaluation (create) involves “judgments about the value of material and methods for given purposes.”

Revised Taxonomy

In 2001, a revised version was created that focuses more on the dynamic conception of classification:

  • Knowledge (remember): recognizing and recalling
  • Comprehension (understand): interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, comparing, and explaining
  • Application (apply): executing and implementing
  • Analysis (analyse): differentiating and organizing
  • Synthesis (evaluate): checking and critiquing
  • Evaluation (create): generating and producing

The Bloom’s taxonomy, therefore, can be used as a reference element for the definition of the Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) of any educational activity, event or set of the same. The definition of the ILOs, therefore, concerns the educational objectives to be achieved through the implementation of approaches that combine the adoption of methods and tools.

An appropriate definition of ILOs for the educational activities should consider the hierarchy that lies within the taxonomy: in order to reach educational objectives at the higher layers of the Bloom’s pyramid depicted above, students have to consolidate their knowledge (which here should be intended as a metacognitive element that spans the whole taxonomy and does not just refer to remembering the basic elements of the same) at the lower layers. In other words, any educational activity should start by defining ILOs at the lower levels of the pyramid and/or verify that students achieve and consolidate those objectives, before moving on towards the higher order skills described by the taxonomy. In other words, moving from the top of the hierarchy towards the lower layers, a student cannot create (i.e. master its skills to generate new concepts with that) without the ability to evaluate what is done by itself and by others. The skill to evaluate the results of any activity (that obviously might change depending on the focus of the educational target and topic), in turn, requires the student to be capable of analysing what he perceives with its senses and/or interprets according to the experiences previously gained. The skills related to the analysis of existing elements should not be mixed with those related to the understanding. Proceeding with the opposite path, thus from the lower layers towards the top ones, it is impossible to understand any concept if one does not remember its main constructs: memorizing these constructs is the basis to figure out how these basic elements are connected with each other. These connections among the different elements constituting the theoretical basis of the topic the students should learn about are critical to make it possible to apply what is understood in context. It is clear, then, that all these skills are related to knowledge in different ways.

  • Remembering is about knowledge recalling, potentially also in an unstructured way.
  • Understanding refers to the knowledge of connections among basic elements of constructs of a specific topic, thus to create a meaning that goes beyond the ones that the elementary elements get per se.
  • Applying is about implementing knowledge in a specific context to execute operations, which were impossible without a clear understanding of the matter.
  • Analysing is about knowledge organization. It concerns the investigation of applied knowledge in order to depict general patterns, thus including skills of abstraction.
  • Evaluating is about leveraging knowledge for the formulation of judgement on knowledge applied and analysed. This can be referred to the evaluation of the self or of third parties.
  • Creating refers to the generation of new knowledge based on the previous one, coherently with the outcomes of analysis and evaluation of previous experience, thus finding new meanings and making them available for the self and the others.

Sources

Bloom, Benjamin S., Krathwohl, David, and Masia, Bertram (1956), Taxonomy of educational objectives. Handbook 1: Cognitive domain, New York: Longman, pp. 201-207.

Anderson, Lorin W., David R. Krathwohl, and Benjamin S. Bloom (2001), A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing : a Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, New York: Longman

Armstrong, P. (2010), Bloom’s Taxonomy, Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, Retrieved August 19, 2021 from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/