Changes in Blooms Taxonomy

Bloom’s Taxonomy Is Now Different


In 2001, Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl and others published A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. This team made some far ranging changes to the original 1948 version of the Taxonomy. This note deals with three of the changes.

First, what is an objective? Anderson and Krathwohl say that an objective contains a verb and a noun. The verb “generally describes the intended cognitive process, and the noun generally describes the knowledge students are expected to acquire or construct (12).” This definition is the key concept for the entire approach. A sample objective is “Evaluate commercials from the standpoint of a set of principles.” The verb is evaluate and the noun (noun phrase in this case) is set of principles.

Second, what do the verb and noun tell you? They tell you where the objective belongs in the new taxonomy. The new taxonomy has a major change—it is a table, not a pyramid. In other words, it is two-dimensional. The cognitive domain is represented by 6 columns and the knowledge domain is represented by four rows. Any objective falls in a cell in the table.

The six cognitive domains are remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. The four knowledge domains are factual, conceptual, procedural and metacognitive. In two excellent chapters the authors define all ten of these concepts and their sub-types. An important differentiation from the old taxonomy is that the authors do not claim that a lower level must be mastered before a higher one can be mastered. Instead they focus on retention and transfer. They say that both are important educational goals. “Retention is the ability to remember material at some later time in much the same way as it was presented during instruction. Transfer is the ability to use what was learned to solve new problem, to answer new questions, or to facilitate learning new subject matter” (63).

This distinction is the basis for splitting the table. Remember is the process related to retention. All the others are related to transfer, which the authors say is ‘meaningful learning.’ The goal for educators is to help create meaningful learning, thus educators must use objectives that focus on transfer.

The layout of the table, however, shows educators that the various cognitive processes for meaningful learning can be spread over four different domains of knowledge. A student could analyze conceptual knowledge or analyze procedural knowledge. A student could understand factual knowledge or evaluate factual knowledge.

Third, to use the table the authors ask educators to ask four questions—the learning question, the instruction question, the assessment question and the alignment question. These questions frame the way instructors teach. Of particular importance is the alignment question.

Here are the questions

1. What is important for students to learn in the limited school and classroom time available?

2. How does on plan and deliver instruction that will result in higher levels of learning for large numbers of students?

3. How does one select or design assessment instruments and procedures that provide accurate information about how well students are learning?

4. How does one ensure that objectives, instruction, and assessment are consistent with one another?

In the last half of the book Anderson and Krathwohl focus on answering these questions by analyzing a set of six vignettes sent to them by practicing teachers at different educational levels. These analyses illustrate how a teacher can use the taxonomy to set up types of learning that will become meaningful and also how to guide their work so that what they do has consistency, or aligns.