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Bloom's Taxonomy revised

26 July, 2019 - 10:10
Available under Creative Commons-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/ce6c5eb6-84d3-4265-9554-84059b75221e@2.1

A few years ago two of Benjamin Bloom's original colleagues, Linda Anderson and David Krathwohl, revised his taxonomy so as to clarify its terms and to make it more complete (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001; Marzano, 2006). The resulting categories are summarized and compared to the original categories in the following Table 10.8. As the chart shows, several categories of objectives have been renamed and a second dimension added that describes the kind of thinking or cognitive processing that may occur. The result is a much richer taxonomy than before, since every level of the objectives can now take four different forms. Remembering, for example, can refer to four different kinds of memory: memory for facts, for concepts, for procedures, or for metacognitive knowledge. The Table 10.8 gives examples of each of these kinds of memory.

Table 10.8 Bloom's Taxonomy of cognitive objectives -- revised

Original term from Bloom's Taxonomy (1956)

Revised term emphasizing cognitive processing (2001)

A new dimension added: types of  knowledge learned (2001)

Example of cognitive process    remembering combined with possible types of knowledge

Knowledge

Remembering

 

Memory for facts:
recalling the names of each part of a living cell

Comprehension

Understanding

  • factual knowledge
  • conceptual knowledge
  • procedural knowledge
  • metacognitive knowledge

Memory for concepts:
recalling the functions of each part of living cell

Application

Applying

Memory for procedures: recalling how toview a cell under a microscope

Analysis

Analyzing

Memory for metacognition: recalling not the names of the parts, but a technique for remembering the names of the parts of a living cell

Evaluation

Evaluating

 

Synthesis

Creating

 
 

Caption: The revision to Bloom's Taxonomy distinguishes between cognitive processes (left-hand column in the table) and types of knowledge learned (right-hand column). The original version has terms similar to the cognitive processing terms in the revised version. According to the revised version, any type of knowledge (from the right-hand column) can, in principle, occur with any type of cognitive processing (left-hand column).