What is Bloom's taxonomy?
Bloom’s taxonomy has been updated and expanded since the original version was set out in the 1950s, and it continues to be a relevant and active tool that educators draw on when structuring curriculum goals and activities. This guide will cover what teachers need to know about Bloom’s taxonomy, from a basic overview of its concepts to how it can be applied to a classroom setting.
A definition of Bloom’s taxonomy
How do learners learn and how can educators teach them effectively? These are the questions that Bloom’s taxonomy tries to answer.
Bloom’s taxonomy is a framework that establishes educational goals. It is organized as a pyramid with six levels (similar to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) and is based on the idea that learning occurs through a step-by-step progression. Students master each level before advancing to the next.
According to this paradigm, lower levels of thinking must be grasped before a learner can reach higher levels of thinking.
The six original cognitive levels of Bloom's Taxonomy are:
- Knowledge: Recall of data or information.
- Comprehension: Understanding the meaning, translation, interpolation, and interpretation of instructions and problems. State a problem in one's own words.
- Application: Use a concept in a new situation or unprompted use of an abstraction. Applies what was learned in the classroom into novel situations in the workplace.
- Analysis: Separates material or concepts into component parts so that its organizational structure may be understood. Distinguishes between facts and inferences.
- Synthesis: Builds a structure or pattern from diverse elements. Puts parts together to form a whole, with emphasis on creating a new meaning or structure.
- Evaluation: Makes judgments about the value of materials and methods for given purposes.
In 2001, a revised version of Bloom's Taxonomy was developed to reflect a more dynamic conception of classification.
This revision flips the last two levels and adds a cognitive process dimension, resulting in the following hierarchy:
- Remembering: Recognizing or recalling knowledge from memory.
- Understanding: Comprehending the meaning of instructions or messages.
- Applying: Using a procedure in a given situation.
- Analyzing: Breaking material into its constituent parts and detecting how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose.
- Evaluating: Making judgments based on criteria and standards.
- Creating: Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure.
Bloom's Taxonomy serves as a foundation for educators to structure teaching and assessment methods, ensuring that learning objectives are met from basic knowledge to complex analysis and evaluation. It encourages educational activities that go beyond memorization, fostering critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills in learners.
A short history of Bloom’s taxonomy
Although the framework bears Benjamin Bloom’s name, it was a collaborative effort that evolved from a series of conferences that took place from 1949 to 1953. These conference sessions aimed to align educators on curriculum design and, particularly, to aid them in learning assessment.
The committee of educators who created and published the framework comprised Bloom, Max Englehart, Edward Furst, Walter Hill, and David Krathwohl. The original version of the framework was first published in 1956 with the title Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.
Since then, it has become known familiarly as “Bloom’s taxonomy” and has informed the philosophies and classroom practices of decades of teachers and educators at all levels.
The taxonomy has been used to clarify learning objectives, establish curricula, and generate classroom activities that allow learners to build their skills systematically.
The following quotes from Bloom express some of his core values and beliefs on education:
- “Education must be increasingly concerned about the fullest development of all children and youth, and it will be the responsibility of the schools to seek learning conditions which will enable each individual to reach the highest level of learning possible.”
- “Creativity follows mastery, so mastery of skills is the first priority for young talent.”
- “What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn if provided with appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.”
Bloom’s taxonomy was revised in 2001 by a team that included assessment specialists, cognitive psychologists, curriculum theorists, and educational researchers. This team was headed by Lorin Anderson, a former student of Bloom’s. The revisions aimed to revitalize the framework and introduce flexibility to the original objectives.
The six stages of learning (original and revised)
Original version of Bloom’s six stages of learning
Each category contains subcategories that fall on a spectrum from simple and concrete to complex and abstract. However, the taxonomy is generally remembered in terms of its six core pillars.
| Original pillar | Explanation (wording from the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives) |
|---|---|
Evaluation | “judgments about the value of material and methods for given purposes” |
Knowledge | “involves the recall of specifics and universals, the recall of methods and processes, or the recall of a pattern, structure, or setting” |
Analysis | “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” |
Comprehension | “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” |
Synthesis | “putting together of elements and parts so as to form a whole” |
Application | “use of abstractions in particular and concrete situations” |
Revised version of Bloom’s six stages of learning
The 2001 revised version of the taxonomy, A Taxonomy for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment, introduced changes and revisions around the classification of the different stages of learning. The pillars changed from nouns to verbs in order to express the active nature of learning. Another key update was the swapping of the final two positions on the hierarchy.
| Original pillar | Revised pillar |
|---|---|
Evaluation | Create |
Knowledge | Remember |
Application | Apply |
Comprehension | Understand |
Synthesis | Evaluate |
Analysis | Analyze |
In essence, the revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy simplified how educators establish clear goals and objectives for learners; the changes also aimed to help learners more clearly grasp how they might successfully move through the different stages of learning.
Why educators should use Bloom’s taxonomy
Bloom’s taxonomy is a powerful framework that educators can use at every step of the learning process, from creating achievable and understandable learning plans to performing effective assessments. An understanding of the taxonomy enables teachers to better plan their lessons and to gauge the impact and outcome of their efforts.
For students, it is an empowering framework that can help them identify their current level of learning and chart a course that will allow them to reach a higher level of learning. Used effectively, the taxonomy supports students in learning new skills, achieving new levels of knowledge, and adopting new attitudes towards their studies.
There’s a reason Bloom’s taxonomy has been in continuous and robust use since it was introduced in the 1950s—it is of lasting value to teaching and learning.Applications for the classroom
The broad and dynamic nature of Bloom’s taxonomy makes it easily adaptable, with a huge range of potential applications for the classroom. Below are just a few of the many ways the taxonomy can be used to support and enhance classroom learning.
Lesson planning and course design
Educators can use the framework to structure curricula throughout the school year that enables clear and steady progress through the six stages of learning.
Assignments and activities with measurable goals can be planned for each learning objective.
Promoting active learning
Classrooms are not fixed entities and the fast pace of digital and technological change in particular has done much to transform the traditional model of teacher as lecturer and students as listeners. Today, learning is seen as much more dynamic, participatory, and self-directed.
Bloom’s taxonomy fits right in with this growing focus on active learning. For example, students working on the Remember pillar might be put into discussion groups and encouraged to challenge each other to recall the important facts that they learned in a previous lesson.
Students at the Analyze stage could be asked to draw connections between what they’ve learned to relevant and related experiences from their own lives.
Creating assessments
Drawing on curriculum that has been designed with the taxonomy in mind, educators can create assessments throughout the school year that effectively track students’ progression through the stages of learning.
One approach might be to devote the first half of the school year to the first three stages (Remember, Understand, and Apply), with mid-term evaluations covering material from those levels of the taxonomy.
The second half of the school year would focus on the remaining stages (Analyze, Evaluate, and Create), with final exams assessing how well students can demonstrate those higher levels of thinking.
In closing
Bloom’s taxonomy has been a useful framework for educators and students for close to 70 years—and with good reason.
It provides clear and relevant pathways for students to move through the orders of thinking, from basic remembering to more complex analysis and application, with the ultimate goal of effective learning.
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