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.
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: |
|
Comprehension |
Understanding |
|
Memory for concepts: |
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).
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