The hierarchy of taxonomies.
Bloom’s Taxonomy is one of the most influential pedagogical frameworks used in education. Created by Benjamin Bloom and colleagues in 1956, the taxonomy attempted to break away from behaviourist theories of the time with the associated learning through remembering. The taxonomy did this by promoting thinking skills, such as analyzing, creating and evaluating concepts. Taking a more holistic approach, the taxonomy includes the cognitive (knowledge-based), affective (emotive-based) and psychomotor (action-based) domains which explain its intuitive appeal to many teachers. We do not only learn with our heads but also by our actions and emotional experiences that reinforce cognitive processes and give them meaning.
The problem is that the pyramidal representation presents a false vision of learning and leads to misconceptions. These include:
- Learning consists of a hierarchy of abilities.
- Cognitive processes are separate and discrete from each other, that one can remember separately from applying what you are remembering.
- Having creativity at the apex gives mistaken idea that some skills are of more cognitively demanding than others. This is in contrast with the complex process that actually takes place in learners' minds as they learn new concepts.
These misconceptions undermine our ability to assist our learners to develop. These dangers of Bloom's taxonomy of being represented as a pyramid is illustrated by the placing of remembering at the bottom. Remembering is then seen as a "lower-level" process that should be avoided as much as possible to give students more "higher-level" skills. The danger is seeing knowledge in this way. This is in some way what traditional educationalists fear is happening in our modern education systems and depriving lower socioeconomic schools of this important knowledge.
Knowledge matters. There are many learning situations where remembering facts are actually the most important skill (e.g., making sure you add the acid to water). Also, learners cannot analyze or evaluate anything if they don't know facts. I agree that an opportunity gap for low-income learners is a serious equity problem. Factual knowledge although domain specific and does not transfer well between disciplines but is needed to develop conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge and metacognitive knowledge which do.
However, I also agree with many of the educators who take the opposing opinion, who are pushing for the other skills, beyond remembering, to be a bigger part of instruction. These educators are motivated by equity as well. Like me, they have observed countless classrooms, where almost every single question is a "remembering" question, where students are rarely asked to analyze or create, and where filling in worksheets dominate lessons. This is where the importance of helping learners organize information and make connections between abstract concepts and facts in order to gain more insight into their disciplines comes in. Simply trying to match thinking skills with facts is not going to produce deep learning that transfers to other disciplines.
The problem in using this perceived hierarchy of Bloom’s cognitive processes to direct your teaching is that it hampers a natural flow of logical reasoning such as in group discussions and the identification of cognitive processes within an individual learner. Take the concept of understanding, The essential behaviour in understanding is that when given information the learner can identify and comprehend the major ideas which are included in it as well as understand their interrelationships. This requires a sense of judgment and caution in reading into the information your own ideas and interpretations. It also requires some ability to go beyond mere rephrasing of parts of the information to determine the larger and more general ideas in it. The interpreter must also recognize the limits within which interpretations can be drawn. Understanding takes a range of "higher-order thinking" skills – summarising, evaluating what the main idea is, conditional and cautious analysis.
So from this example, the major problem with the taxonomy is that it does not accurately represent the way that we learn things. We don't start by remembering things, then understand them, then apply them, and move up the pyramid in steps as our capacity grows. In reality, learning is neither a clear-cut hierarchy nor a sequence of cognitive processes since we are dealing with interactive, mutually dependent processes: no analysis without prior evaluation, no evaluation without prior analysis. For this reason, assuming a static hierarchy of processes like in Bloom’s Taxonomy is not helpful. Instead, much of the time we build understanding by applying knowledge and by creating things.
Think about when you set out to learn something new--let's say using a new application in the classroom. We certainly have to learn facts and remember things. But we also quickly realize that we have little understanding until we have actually tried to use the application. In other words, we have to apply and create in order to understand. The creation process is where we construct a deep understanding.
This is the same for our learners. We may "teach" learners how to draw Lewis diagrams through teacher-led instruction. We may assume then that they understand this skill. But I would argue that they have no real understanding of how to draw a Lewis diagram until they have applied their knowledge and created a Lewis diagram for themselves. Additionally, they need to analyze and evaluate the first attempt of their Lewis diagram, and those of their peers, to build an understanding of what represents a good Lewis diagram so that they can revise and improve. Additionally, they need to analyze and evaluate their Lewis diagrams, along with models of other Lewis diagrams, to build an understanding of what represents quality so that they can revise and improve. This integrated, circular, iterative process is how learners build understanding.
Through this lens, learning can then be seen as being structured according to logical stages, such as problem identification, problem reframing, identification of learning required, self-directed research, research review, solutions development, solutions presentation and peer or individual review. The emphasis, for teachers, shouldn't be which cognitive process to choose as the focus of a lesson, or how to move up the pyramid. Every part of the framework matters. Teachers should instead strive for balance and integration. Instruction and assessments should incorporate all the cognitive processes. Teachers are bound to get poor results when their instruction is mainly about remembering facts but their assessments demand that learners evaluate those facts. Assessment cannot be based on ticking boxes of which cognitive process has been covered by a learner, but by assessing the quality of underlying reasoning.
I understand that no framework can match real life. Frameworks create artificial categories to help us organize our thinking, and those categories are rarely truly discrete in practice or the only way information can be bundled. Frameworks can be useful anyway. The taxonomy is useful in many ways. I love how it reminds teachers to be strategic about both how they want students to think (the cognitive dimension) and what they want students to think about (the knowledge dimension).
However, I believe that Bloom's Taxonomy does more harm than good. It encourages us to organize classroom instruction counter to the way that we actually learn. If we agree that understanding is often built through application and creation, we need to provide opportunities for learners to create things (and analyse those creations) much of the time. While they create and analyze, they will build knowledge and understanding.
It is important to reinforce here that the application and creation of knowledge do not necessarily require hands-on learning. We can apply ideas to situations take, for example, Newton's three laws of motion you may understand them but can you solve new problems related to them without prompting? That’s an application, thus, “application” is really a synonym for “transfer”. Application problems must be new; learners must judge which prior learning applies, without prompting or hints from scaffolded worksheets; and learners must get practice in how to handle non-routine problems.
When I first started out as a classroom teacher and my learners were unusually successful, people often asked me what made my classroom different. One difference was basic: my learners spent much of the lesson doing things, not sitting and listening. They might be short, discipline-specific tasks--written pieces or chemical equation problems. They were working to build understanding (at the same time as we were remembering, evaluating, and synthesizing) through doing.
Whatever careers and life choices our learners make, many will soon find themselves in situations where they need to create things (e.g., websites, blueprints and circuit boards). Much of their learning will take place while they create these things, during the process of research, trial, prototype, critique, and revision. What they learn through this process will send them back to books or other resources, or encourage them to connect with colleagues in order to learn new facts. Learning in life is dynamic, synergistic, interrelated, and deeply connected to creation. It is never a pyramid.
Additional References:
Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (2001). A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York, N.Y.: Pearson.
Bandura, A. (2001). Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Perspective. Annual Review Of Psychology, 52(1), 1
Bandura, A. (2006). Toward a Psychology of Human Agency. Perspectives on Psychological Science, (2). 164.
Berger, R. (2018, March 15). “Here’s What’s Wrong With Bloom’s Taxonomy: A Deeper Learning Perspective.” Education Week. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning_deeply/2018/03/heres_whats_wrong_with_blooms_taxonomy_a_deeper_learning_perspective.html
Bloom, B. S.; Engelhart, M. D.; Furst, E. J.; Hill, W. H.; Krathwohl, D. R. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. Handbook I: Cognitive domain. New York: David McKay Company.
Briñol, P., & DeMarree, K. G. (2012). Social metacognition. New York, NY: Psychology Press.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2012). Motivation, personality, and development within embedded social contexts: An overview of self-determination theory. In R. M. Ryan (Ed.), Oxford handbook of human motivation (pp. 85-107). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195399820.001.0001
Efklides, A. (2006). Metacognition and affect: What can metacognitive experiences tell us about the learning process? Educational Research Review, 13-14. doi:10.1016/j.edurev.2005.11.001
Hattie, J. (2012). Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning. London: Routledge.
Iowa State University (2017). Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy. Retrieved from: http://www.celt.iastate.edu/teaching/effective-teaching-practices/revised-blooms-taxonomy
Kim, Y. R., Park, M. S., Moore, T. J., & Varma, S. (2013). Multiple levels of metacognition and their elicitation through complex problem-solving tasks. The Journal Of Mathematical Behavior, 32(3), 377-396. doi:10.1016/j.jmathb.2013.04.002
Lemov, D. (2017, April 3). “Bloom’s Taxonomy—That Pyramid Is a Problem.” Retrieved from http://teachlikeachampion.com/blog/blooms-taxonomy-pyramid-problem/
Mehta, Jal & Sarah Fine. (2015). The Why, What, Where, and How of Deeper Learning in American Secondary Schools. Students at the Center: Deeper Learning Research Series. Boston: Jobs for the Future.
