NUTS & BOLTS

 An assessment newsletter serving Springfield College and Benedictine University

Using Bloom's Taxonomy

'Have yourself a merry little outcome': Assessing course goals, CATs and student learning objectives over the holidays

Editor's note. First of a two-part series on how to use Bloom's Taxonomy, a classification of learning behaviors commonly used by K-12 teachers, in planning lessons, assignments and assessment techniques in a college course.

When it snowed a week or so after finals, the Springfield-Benedictine campus turned into a winter wonderland. Even as the snowscape melted away under typical central Illinois gray skies and freezing drizzle, the Brinkerhoff Home looked festive with its Christmas wreath and holly boughs along the porch. It was a perfect season to start thinking of holly, mistletoe, shopping trips, parties, assessment of student learning outcomes in fall semester classes and realigning course goals and objectives for spring semester. 

In my case, it's especially pressing because I'm drawing up a syllabus for a new spring semester course. It's a 300-level reading course in journalism and literature, and I'm in the process of setting goals and objectives. So I've been doing keyword searches all over the pedagogical websites, looking for pointers. One of the most useful is something called Bloom's Taxonomy. While that may sound like a field guide for identifying trees by their bark and twigs (perhaps their flowers?), it turns out to be a way of classifying different thought processes our students use when they're learning from us. (That's what "taxonomy" means, at any rate, a system for classifying things.) Even though I'd never heard of it before I got involved with faculty committees, I can't overstate its importance. Or its usefulness to rank-and-file classroom teachers.

When we speak of "Bloom's Taxonomy," we're using a shorthand name for a 1956 study commissioned by the American Psychological Association, performed by six behavioral scientists and chaired by B.S. Bloom (I'm not kidding about his initials). It classified or created a taxonomy, in Bloom's word,  for educational goals and objectives. It was amended in 2001 by L. W. Anderson and D.R. Krathwohl. If you want to know more about it, Mary Foreman of the University of Georgia at Athens has an excellent introduction to Bloom's Taxonomy on UGA's Emerging Perspectives on Learning, Teaching, and Technologyogy website. I especially liked Foreman's clear way of explaining the main differences between the 1956 version (which I was already familiar with) and the 2001 revision (which I wasn't). Foreman says "when designing effective lesson plans, teachers often look to Bloom's Taxonomy for guidance." She adds, "the Revised Taxonomy offers teachers an even more powerful tool to help design their lesson plans."

Bloom identified six levels of cognitive behavior, ranging from rote memory to evaluation and creation. The simplest behaviors he ranked as lower-order thinking skills and the most complex as higher-order skills. Often they are represented graphically as steps in a triangle, the lower-order skills (which are considered foundational to the others) at the base and the higher-order skills up toward the apex. As revised by Anderson and Krathwohl, the skills are:

Remembering:  (At the bottom of the pyramid, called Knowledge in 1956). Retrieving, recognizing, and recalling relevant knowledge from long-term memory.

Understanding: (The next lowest rung of the pyramid, called Comprehension in 1956). Constructing meaning from oral, written, and graphic messages through interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing, and explaining.

Applying: (Third from the bottom, called Application in 1956). Carrying out or using a procedure through executing, or implementing.

Analyzing:  (Third from the top, sometimes considered the first of the higher-order skills, called Analysis in 1956). Breaking material into constituent parts, determining how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose through differentiating, organizing, and attributing.

Evaluating: (Next to the top, called Synthesis in 1956). Making judgments based on criteria and standards through checking and critiquing.

Creating: (The highest, or most complex, of the higher-order skills, called Evaluation in 1956). Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure through generating, planning, or producing.

Well, yeah, that's very nice, I can hear you saying. But what's it got to do with lesson plans?  Basically, this: We can develop readings and exercises using the "behaviors" -- the individual thinking skills like organizing, summarizing, comparing and critiquing -- to help our students learn, lock in and retain information from day to day, week to week and semester to semester. Foreman's introduction has a tongue-in-cheek example, adapted from the Omaha school district, of how "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" might be taught using Bloom's taxonomy:

Remember: Describe where Goldilocks lived.
Understand: Summarize what the Goldilocks story was about.
Apply: Construct a theory as to why Goldilocks went into the house.
Analyze: Differentiate between how Goldilocks reacted and how you would react in each story event.
Evaluate: Assess whether or not you think this really happened to Goldilocks.
Create: Compose a song, skit, poem, or rap to convey the Goldilocks story in a new form.

Notice the verbs? They're action words, each describing something the kids will do as they make the story of Goldilocks their own and learn how to apply it to their own lives of learning, service and leadership in a diverse world. Teachers use them all the time when they plan their lessons, and you can find any number of handy-dandy verb lists by searching keywords like "Bloom's Taxonomy" and "lesson plan." (I'd try "verbs," too.) It's all too easy to let this degenerate into a monkey-see, monkey-do process, but it doesn't have to. These verbs are the building blocks of learning objectives -- they're the things, in other words, we want our students to be able to do after we've taught them what we can. Our syllabuses say on completion of the course, they'll be able to do things like describe, summarize,  explain,  demonstrate, differentiate, critique, evaluate or, yes, assess course content. It's by using aids like Bloom's Taxonomy we can get help them get to that point.

In making out our learning objectives, or in assessing how well we've accomplished them, we can always stand a little higher-order thinking ourselves.  A guide to writing learning objectives for new instructors at Carnegie Mellon University cautions:

Learning objectives should break down the task and focus on specific cognitive processes. Many activities that faculty believe require a single skill (for example, writing or problem solving) actually involve a synthesis of many component skills. To master these complex skills, students must practice and gain proficiency in the discrete component skills (for writing this may involve identifying an argument, enlisting appropriate evidence, organizing paragraphs, etc; for problem solving it may require defining the parameters of the problem, choosing appropriate formulas, etc.). Breaking down the skills will allow us to select appropriate assessments and instructional strategies so that students practice all component skills.

The Carnegie Mellon guide continues:

Learning objectives should use action verbs. Focusing on concrete actions and behaviors allows us to make student learning explicit, and communicates to students the kind of intellectual effort we expect of them. For instance, sample learning objectives for a math class might be “State theorems,” “Prove theorems,” “Apply theorems to solve problems, “ and/or “Decide when a given theorem applies.” While they all have to do with theorems, the first one implies memorization and recall, the middle two imply applying knowledge, and the last one involves meta-cognitive decision-making skills. Using action verbs enables you to more easily measure the degree to which students can, in fact, do what you expect them to do, as explained in the next bullet item.

Linked to the Carnegie Mellon guide is a one-page PDF file listing "Verb's for Bloom's Taxonomy." It's short, but it contains every verb I'd ever want to consider in making out my own lesson plans. I've printed it out and taped it to my hard drive for the rest of the holiday season.

Next: How Bloom's Taxonomy might help us think in a more focused way about what we do in the classroom, and how we can better link it day by day to mission statement, program objectives and assessment outcomes.

-- Pete Ellertsen, chair, assessment committee

Nuts &  Bolts is an electronic newsletter published by SCI's Assessment Committee. Faculty members are: Wayne Burrows, Brian Carrigan, Molly Finley, Dave Holland, Tom Jackson, Darlene Snyder and Pete Ellertsen (chair). Kevin Broeckling, dean of students; Michael Bromberg, academic affairs dean, and Joanna Beth Tweedy, resource center director, serve ex officio. Student member is Justin White. If you have information, comments or feedback, please contact any committee member or Nuts & Bolts editor Pete Ellertsen, in 211 Beata Hall on the SCI/Benedictine campus, 525-1420 ext. 519 or by e-mail at <pellertsen@sci.edu>.