Unlearning and Relearning Bloom's Taxonomy - Part 1

The misinformation and misinterpretation about one of the education's most important concepts.

Apr 17, 2023

Let me spill the beans right away. Lorin W. Anderson is one of the creators’ of the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, and I’m paraphrasing him:

“Bloom’s Taxonomy is not a tool to create Learning Objective.
It is a tool to map out different cognitive process with differing complexities and analyze the quality of the learning objectives.
It is an analytical tool to help teachers make assessment fair, valid, and reliable.”

All these years as a teacher and teacher developer, I had been using it blindly and I never bothered to look into the original sources. Personally, this insight from Anderson hit me really hard.

That’s my confession.

Now, please read further. This is a long article in three parts, so you might want to stay caffeinated :)

But first, what is Bloom’s Taxonomy?

Here’s the standard information about it.

Bloom's taxonomy is a set of three hierarchical models used for classification of educational learning objectives into levels of complexity and specificity. The three lists cover the learning objectives in cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains.
Benjamin Bloom and his team developed this taxonomy in the 1950s. And it was revised in 2001 by his former student Lorin W. Anderson and team.

There are three domains but almost all the time, when someone talks about Bloom’s taxonomy, they usually refer to the Cognitive domain only.

And, 100% of the time, it is represented as the following figure. This is the misinformation part.

The Application of Bloom’s Taxonomy:

Currently, teachers, educator, professors, course designers, trainers, etc use it for three major reasons:

a. to design courses/curriculum

b. to develop learning goals, instructional outcomes, learning outcomes.

c. to help teachers/examiners develop assessment that matches learning objectives to any given level of mastery (thinking and doing)

So far so good.

Just a google search on this, and you will find hundreds of resources on it. You will also find charts or tables with Bloom’s Verbs.

This is pretty much almost every graduate of B.Ed or M.Ed will learn about Bloom’s taxonomy. The pyramid containing cognitive domain, the verbs, Higher Order Thinking skills, Lower Order Thinking skills, and how it is used to construct learning objectives.

Likewise, there’s a rigid insistence among teachers and trainers to strictly never use the phrase “to understand” while writing the learning objectives. The reason: the word ‘understand’ is too vague.

Bloom’s Taxonomy from the Horse’s Mouth

Now let’s hear from the horse’s mouth, Lorin W. Anderson, about what it is and why it was developed originally, and how it has been used, misused, and abused in the education world.

There are two videos in the links below but you can simply read the summary of this interview.

Interview Part 1:

Interview Part 2: Link

After going through the full interview, here are the

Seven Major Points about Bloom’s Taxonomy

That you may or may not have heard and misheard.

1. Bloom's Taxonomy was developed by college examiners for college examiners.

Circa 1950s USA. Every course in the universities had end of the year examinations. This was a very labor intensive thing. So they set up a structure where a university examiner who was responsible for all of the courses, all of the divisions. And a college examiner for each college.

Benjamin Bloom was also a college examiner at one of the universities. He got together with a few of his colleagues and worked together to classify the learning objectives.

The taxonomy filled the need for a streamlined, fair, and valid way to evaluate the students beyond numerical grading.

The examiners worked together with the course instructors to develop exams in such a way that both side, the examiners and the teachers, felt comfortable that evaluation was valid, fair, and reliable.

2. The most popular, frequently cited but least read book in education.

(This is a huge surprise.)

People aren’t getting this concept from the original sources. They’re getting it from citations, somebody else’s presentation, discussions. This has lead to a lot of misinterpretation, misinformation, and perceptions about the taxonomy which are away from the truth.

(In my case, I also got it handed over by my professor during my studies at Kathmandu University, School of Education. And then I started seeing the pyramid in almost every seminar or conference or workshop I attended.)

3. Bloom's Taxonomy was not created to make learning objectives.

(Another huge surprise.)

The taxonomy was created for the validation of assessment items but NOT to create learning objectives. It is an analytical tool that you use AFTER you created learning objective for your course.

For example, to check whether all of the objectives require only the Memorization or only the Application. And on the other hand, to check whether every learning objective deals with only creative burst of energy.

So it is meant to be used as a template to get a better picture, whether all of the objectives are balanced and that they fit together. And that the objectives reflect a mix of cognitive skills and different types of knowledge.

4. What’s the whole thing with the pyramid?

(Now the biggest misinterpretation.)

The pyramid was indeed an idea in the original Bloom’s taxonomy. It was an attempt at creating a cumulative hierarchy, meaning in order to get to the next step, one had to go through the step below.

Knowledge was necessary for Comprehension. Comprehension was necessary for Application, all the way up to Evaluation.

But during the revision, they changed the nouns into verbs because their logic was: it’s not necessary to evaluate what knowledge they have, but how they remembered or how they understood or analyzed or applied the knowledge they have.

(Note: Remember, Bloom’s taxonomy was created for the purpose of evaluation/assessment.)

Unfortunately, the removal of Knowledge (or nouns) during the revision led to the misbelief that “knowledge” is the least important level.

(Note: This misbelief is also the source of HOTs and LOTs, Higher Order Thinking skills and Lower Order Thinking skills.)

But that’s simply not the case. Even if you look at the taxonomy from the pyramid point of view, Knowledge is the building block of everything else. Without Knowledge, there is no need to go any higher.

That’s why the pyramid/triangle is such a misleading diagram.

Instead, Anderson likes to view it like a rectangle, a toolbox with six different tools.

Sometimes you’ll have to Apply first to Understand. You start to try all the things and all of a sudden you realize that you don’t Understand. Or you Analyze to determine what the proper Application is. And after you Apply, you Evaluate to see whether the solution you came up with makes sense.

Of course each tool has a certain hierarchy based on complexity, but no one should use these only in the strict sequence of: Remember - Understand - Apply -Analyze - Evaluate - Create.

It’s not a lockstep process. The levels overlap one another.

You can choose the kind of cognitive process that gets you to your learning objectives you have set.

5. Why do colleges/universities still misinterpret the taxonomy?

Many colleges/universities (including mine from where I graduated) still promote this Bloom’s Taxonomy as a tool to create learning objectives.

The taxonomy is used for building a set of learning objectives by looking at the level you want to address and pick one of the verbs from the list.

Well that’s backwards, Anderson says.

This is how you do it:

You basically think through the content of the course and ask yourself: of all the concepts that students could learn from this course, what’s the most important concept or idea?

And start identifying the objectives as the per needs of the learners.

Then only use the taxonomy to analyze the objectives, for balance and for the assessment purpose.

Are all the cognitive domains balanced through out the objectives? If there’s too much focus on the Applying, and not enough on Understanding, the learners might be able to do it, but when things go wrong, they will not know how to fix it.

6. How to create Learning Objectives then?

Most of the learning objectives are stated in the grammatical structure of
Subject + Verb + Object.

Example: (Subject) Learners will be able to (Verb) certain concept of the content (Object).

The Verb part generally describes the intended cognitive process. And the Object part generally describes the knowledge students are expected to acquire or construct.

But there are two problems.

Most of the times, the Object part is left ambiguous. It lacks specificity.

Imagine, you are training a group of auto-mechanics to repair vehicles. Some of the procedural knowledge (repairing and fixing) can be general. But the same procedures may not work the same way for every brand and type of vehicles.
The trainees will also have to learn about factual knowledge, conceptual knowledge, and even about their own knowledge (meta-knowledge)

Another one. “Describe connections between historical and cultural influences and literacy selections.”
What connections? What influences? What selections?
Similarly, the Verb part is also problematic.
Eg: Students will be able to list ten advantages of using simple machines.

When you say “List”, do you mean recall somebody else’s list or analyze a process and come up with your own list of things.

What does “Write” mean? In which domain of the taxonomy do you put the verb “write”? Is it a cognitive ability, or something else?

The danger of focusing too much on Behavioral Objectives — without looking at the cognitive processes that goes in it — is you make faulty inferences. Like, assuming that when a student is able to perform something, the student has learned the concept.

You might assume/think that student understand something because the student does something. But you find out that a week later, the student can’t do it that well. Because the student simply failed to build understanding about what it was that he was doing.

(Note: this is a great insight. Forcing us to think critically about the limitations of ‘learning by doing’.)

7. There’s more in Bloom’s Taxonomy:

When we talk about Bloom’s Taxonomy, most of us only talk about the Cognitive domain. But there are two more: Psycho-motor and Affective domains too. And each domain has certain underlying dimensions.

With Cognitive taxonomy, the dimension is “complexity”, that as you move from the lower to the upper, things become more complex. In addition, Cognitive domain is categorized in terms of a continuum. Starting from Factual to Conceptual, Procedural, and to Metacognitive knowledge.
The underlying dimension of Affective domain is “internalization”. Whatever you are learning, eventually becomes a part of who you are. You internalize the knowledge or skills and they become a part of your value system, or moral compass. A part of your identity.
The underlying dimension of Psycho-motor domain is “automaticity”. You start playing a basketball and with practice you become better and eventually you gain certain fluency. Similar to learning a new language. Or doing presentations. Automaticity allows you to free up your working memory (cognitive part).

All of these domains overlap each other.

Meaning, we need to look at learning from all these three overlapping domains. Focusing on only one domain is incomplete.

The Seven Major Points once again:

Bloom's Taxonomy was developed by college examiners for college examiners. The taxonomy was created to make sure the evaluation was valid, fair, and reliable.
Ironically, the book is the most popular book in education, but the least read.
The taxonomy was not meant for creating learning objectives, it was meant for the purpose of assessing the balance in the learning objectives.
The taxonomy can be looked as a pyramid or can be looked as a rectangular toolbox with several tools. The taxonomy is not meant to design the learning objectives, they are meant for assessment. They are meant to map out various cognitive processes of differing complexities so that teachers can get their students towards the learning objectives.
Teachers, Professors, Trainers, Course instructors have misinterpreted and misused Bloom’s taxonomy. Instead of starting by figuring out the important concepts students need to learn from the course, they start by picking and choosing Bloom’s verbs to create learning objectives.
Behavioral Objectives might result in faulty inference about learning.
The three domains Cognitive, Psycho-motor, and Affective have underlying dimensions of complexity, automaticity, and internalization respectively. And, all three domains overlap each other.

There’ you go.

Have you heard this quote? That, “All models are wrong, but some models are useful.”

Despite the pervasive misinterpretation and misuse, I believe, Bloom’s Taxonomy is supremely useful model for teachers.

Where it gets tricky is most teachers will look at the pyramid, and intuitively pick and choose verbs from the ‘upper’ level, and not focus much on the foundation levels.

Also, most teacher will still look learning from the “cognitive verbs” aspect only, while forgetting that there are two overlapping domains of learning.

Some useful links:

A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy: An Overview (Article)

The Revised Version of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Book)

Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (NIU, CITL)