Admit it: you only read the list of the six levels of the Taxonomy, not the whole book that explains each level and the rationale behind the Taxonomy. Not to worry, you are not alone: this is true for most educators.
But that efficiency comes with a price. Many educators have a mistaken view of the Taxonomy and the levels in it, as the following errors suggest. And arguably the greatest weakness of the Common Core Standards is to avoid being extra-careful in their use of cognitive-focused verbs, along the lines of the rationale for the Taxonomy.
The 5 misunderstandings:
- The first two or three levels of the Taxonomy involve “lower-order” and the last three or four levels involve “higher-order” thinking.
This is false. The only lower-order goal is “Knowledge” since it uniquely requires mere recall in testing. Furthermore, it makes no sense to think that “Comprehension” – the 2nd level – requires only lower-order thought:
The essential behavior in interpretation is that when given a communication the student can identify and comprehend the major ideas which are included in it as well as understand their interrelationships. This requires nice sense of judgment and caution in reading into the document one’s own ideas and interpretations. It also requires some ability to go beyond mere rephrasing of parts of the document to determine the larger and more general ideas in it. The interpreter must also recognize the limits within which interpretations can be drawn.
Not only is this higher-order thinking – summary, main idea, conditional and cautious reasoning, etc. – it is a level not reached by half of our students in reading, as I noted in my recent post on the sad results in literacy assessment over the past decades.
And by the way: the phrases “lower-order” and “higher-order” appear nowhere in the Taxonomy.
- “Application” requires hands-on learning.
This is not true, a mis-reading of the word “apply”, as the text makes clear. We apply ideas to situations, e.g. you may comprehend Newton’s 3 Laws or the Writing Process but can you solve novel problems related to it – without prompting? That’s application:
The whole cognitive domain of the taxonomy is arranged in a hierarchy, that is, each classification within it demands the skills and abilities which are lower in the classification order. The Application category follows this rule in that to apply something requires “comprehension” of the method, theory, principle or abstraction applied. Teachers frequently say, “If a student really comprehends something then he can apply it.”
A problem in the comprehension category requires the student to know an abstraction well enough that he can correctly demonstrate its use when specifically asked to do so. “Application,” however, requires a step beyond this. Given a problem new to the student, he will apply the appropriate abstraction without having to be prompted as to which abstraction is correct or without having to be shown how to do it in this situation.
Note the key phrases: Given a problem new to the student, he will apply the appropriate abstraction without having to be prompted. Thus, “application” is really a synonym for “transfer”.
In fact, the authors strongly assert the primacy of application/transfer of learning:
The fact that most of what we learn is intended for application to problem situations in real life is indicative of the importance of application objectives in the general curriculum. The effectiveness of a large part of the school program is therefore dependent upon how well the students carry over into situations applications which the students never faced in the learning process. Those of you familiar with educational psychology will recognize this as the age-old problem of transfer of training. Research studies have shown that comprehending an abstraction does not certify that the individual will be able to apply it correctly. Students apparently also need practice in restructuring and classifying situations so that the correct abstraction applies.
Why UbD is what it is. in Application problems must be new; students must judge which prior learning applies, without prompting or hints from scaffolded worksheets; and students must get training and have practice in how to handle non-routine problems.
Which is why UbD is what it is: we designed it, in part, backward from Bloom’s definition of Application.
As for instruction in support of the aim of transfer, the authors soberingly note this:
We have also attempted to organize some of the literature on growth, retention, and transfer of the different types of educational outcomes or behaviors. Here we find very little relevant research. … Many claims have been made for different educational procedures…but seldom have these been buttressed by research findings.
- All the verbs listed under each level of the Taxonomy are more or less equal; they are synonyms for the level.
No, there are distinct sub-levels of the Taxonomy, in which the cognitive difficulty of each sub-level increases.
For example, under Knowledge, the lowest-level form is Knowledge of Terminology, where a more demanding form of recall is Knowledge of the Major Ideas, Schemes and Patterns in a field of study, and where the highest level of Knowledge is Knowledge of Theories and Structures (for example, knowing the structure and organization of Congress.)
Under Comprehension, the three sub-levels in order of difficulty are Translation, Interpretation, and Extrapolation. Main Idea in literacy, for example, falls under Interpretation since it demands more than “translating” the text into one’s own words, as noted above.
- The Taxonomy recommends against the goal of “understanding” in education.
Only in the sense of the term “understand” being too broad. Rather, the Taxonomy helps us to more clearly delineate the different levels of understanding we seek:
To return to the illustration of the term “understanding” a teacher might use the Taxonomy to decide which of several meanings he intended. If it meant that the student was…aware of a situation…to describe it in terms slightly different from those originally used in describing it, this would correspond to the taxonomy category of “translation” [which is a sub-level under Comprehension]. Deeper understanding would be reflected in the next-higher level of the Taxonomy, “interpretation,” where the student would be expected to summarize and explain… And there are other levels of the Taxonomy which the teacher could use to indicate still deeper “understanding.”
- The writers of the Taxonomy were confident that the Taxonomy was a valid and complete Taxonomy
No they weren’t. They note that –
“Our attempt to arrange educational behaviors from simple to complex was based on the idea that a particular simple behavior may become integrated with other equally simple behaviors to form a more complex behavior… Our evidence on this is not entirely satisfactory, but there is an unmistakable trend pointing toward a hierarchy of behaviors.
They were concerned especially that no single theory of learning and achievement–
“accounted for the varieties of behaviors represented in the educational objectives we attempted to classify. We were reluctantly forced to agree with Hilgard that each theory of learning accounts for some phenomena very well but is less adequate in accounting for others. What is needed is a larger synthetic theory of learning than at present seems available.
Later schemas – such as Webb’s Depth of Knowledge and the revised Taxonomy – do nothing to solve this basic problem, with implications for all modern Standards documents.
Why this all matters. The greatest failure of the Common Core Standards is arguably to have overlooked these issues by being arbitrary/careless in the use of verbs in the Standards. There appears to have been no attempt to be precise and consistent in the use of the verbs in the Standards, thus making it almost impossible for users to understand the level of rigor prescribed by the standard, hence levels of rigor required in local assessments. (Nothing is said in any documents about how deliberate those verb choices were, but I know from prior experience in New Jersey and Delaware that verbs are used haphazardly – in fact, writing teams start to vary the verbs just to avoid repetition!)
The problem is already on view: in many schools, the assessments are less rigorous than the Standards and practice tests clearly demand. No wonder the scores are low.
I’ll have more to say on this problem in a later post, but my prior posts on Standards provide further background on the problem we face.
PS NOTE: Already people are arguing with me on Twitter as if I agree with everything said here. I nowhere say here that Bloom was right about the Taxonomy. (His doubts about his own work suggest my real views, don’t they?) I am merely reporting what he said and what is commonly misunderstood.
In fact, I am re-reading Bloom as part of a critique of the Taxonomy in support of the revised 3rd edition of UbD in which we call for a more sophisticated view of the idea of depth and rigor in learning and assessment than currently exists.
33 Responses
On re-reading Polya’s “How to solve it” recently I was forced to conclude that most people who actually have picked up the book only read the introduction.
Very true – I refer to Polya all the time – almost no math teachers have read it as a book. Sad, really.
But many authors of K-8 textbooks have read it and seem to think that it means a problem solving schema exists independent of the content and procedural knowledge to solve a problem.
Even (why do I say “even” ?) educational researchers do not seem to have got far into the book. Check my post on the word problem training schema for special ed students:
https://howardat58.wordpress.com/2015/01/25/i-didnt-know-whether-to-laugh-or-to-cry/
I would quit math if that was my “help” as a special needs student…
I’m not sure who all receives this blog, but every one seems to have something of value to take away. I particularly like how he ends this, with the haphazard use of verbs in the Common Core. Mirrors our discussion as we try to figure out what a PE is really trying to communicate. We are obviously not alone.
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In times of change, learners will inherit the Earth,while the learned will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world which no longer exists. Eric Hoffer
This is an important parsing of common misunderstandings – those I have held myself and those I have heard from others many times. Your notes on the complexity of comprehension, and the fall-out from underestimating its difficulty as teachers, are essential for educators to understand. I was struck by the application-as-transfer concept, and the implications for some of the ways in which language arts teachers like myself sometimes contort our curricula to allow for authentic application in ways that might actually distort the learning objective when a focus on providing a novel opportunity for transfer might well be better. The note on curriculum writers varying verbs to avoid repetition stuns. Lots to digest here. Thanks for the post.
Much appreciated. Big problem in English is to scaffold/prompt the eventual essay/project on a book that was read so that no novel application/interpretation is being done.
I’m not totally familiar with the Common Core, but I’m surprised that there doesn’t seem to be a common (sorry) lexicon of command terms (such as ‘state’, ‘describe’, ‘discuss’) with an appropriate gradient of difficulty. Without that basis it seems difficult to reach any common (sorry again) understandings on expectations.
Great points in the blog post. Literally everyone I know in education has told me that the Bloom’s Taxonomy is like a ladder that you work up – hopefully get to the top by the end of the year (or at least make progress towards that goal). Your post does make more sense because each level actually does require higher order skills – maybe that’s why we never seem to make it to the top of the ladder.
The ladder view makes no sense, really. By such an argument, soccer players would never get to play the game and we would never require written papers of younger students.
I am currently working on my master’s degree in education and was recently taught the ladder view of Bloom’s Taxonomy. I never understood the ladder view as students’ minds are built entirely different from one another. How can one taxonomy, in this specific order, work for every single individual in the classroom? Personally, I like the levels of the ladder but I would prefer to jump around if possible. With the use of technology, I want to start creating and applying right away with my students. Why can we not make sense of it all (understanding and remembering) after we have created something amazing?
The “ladder” view is unfortunate, and somewhat mistaken. Bloom and his colleagues never said that it reflected a chronology of how teaching should go. Rather, he claimed – rightly or wrongly we’ll ignore for the moment – that each level builds upon the previous levels so that cognitive difficulty increases. That in no way implies that you cannot, in teaching, start with evaluation questions or synthesis (creating) activities. Rather, it means that, for assessment, the higher levels are more difficult. Rats! I should have talked about the ladder as a misunderstanding. I think I will!
Thanks for the comment.
This post strongly mirrors a presentation (http://goo.gl/jr72Fz – start at slide 29 for information related to this post) I recently gave that focused on the Affective Domain – the Second Domain that the group that Bloom chaired published (http://tinyurl.com/AffectiveDomain). I love this quote from Bloom about Book 1: “One of the most widely cited yet least read books in American education”. I believe that by focusing solely on the Cognitive Domain with limited understanding of its purpose, and not taking the time to understand the true scope of what the three domains were trying to uncover about measuring learning, that we have done a great disservice to students and teachers in regards to the arts of learning and teaching. At the same time we have over simplified what it takes to measure mastery. By only focusing on cognitive aspects of mastering a topic we ignore other inherit and important skills, inside of the Affective and Psychomotor Domains that help students invest in the learning process and ultimately achieve mastery the cognitive goals, while building skills to connections beyond the limits of those standards. A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and unfortunately in the case of throwing around the taxonomy, that is often the case.
Cross Posted with some additional thoughts at: http://henrythiele.blogspot.com/2015/03/in-response-to-grant-wiggins-5.html
You make a great point here and others also suggested that I missed an opportunity to highlight the 3 domains – I agree!
Reblogged this on peakmemory and commented:
A good account of the many misunderstandings of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Reblogged this on teaching knowledge and creativity.
Enjoyed the article and the comments. In this age where “the word smith” is king I truly would love to debunk the fact that the word “understanding ” is a dirty word. As an educator I live for the “ah ha moments” (the moment when understanding / the light goes on in the kids head). I vote that we all reconsider the word and value it in our work.
Really enjoyed this post, Grant. We’ve traded comments before on my use of Bloom’s Taxonomy to design and then divide up learning objectives for the purpose of planning flipped classrooms. I can definitely identify at least a couple of misconceptions that I myself have labored under, in what you’ve written, and I’ll need to rethink how Bloom plays out in flipped learning.
One thing I was wondering — you mentioned your dislike of the “ladder” metaphor for describing Bloom’s Taxonomy, but you also refer (in a quote) to the taxonomy as a “hierarchy”. I wonder if thinking of the taxonomy as a hierarchy is the wrong approach. This seems to imply a vertical structure to the skills in the taxonomy — as indeed the famous pyramid suggests — when in fact the taxonomy is more of a “flat” network of interrelated skills, perhaps with some precedence rules (e.g. understanding comes before application) but not totally ordered, if I may borrow a math term.
And if you agree with that, do you think that a new visual representation of the taxonomy is in order, one that does not imply a linear ordering of skills?
Looking forward to that third edition of UbD too, by the way.
I think it is a mistake to treat it as a Taxonomy, i.e. as if we knew for sure that each level is cognitively more demanding than the next level. The error is clear when you compare, say, “evaluating” a paper as a kid vs. “applying” the water cycle theory to a complicated set of data about evaporation. In other words, there are extremely difficult comprehension and application tasks and extremely simple synthesis and evaluation tasks. Bloom acknowledges this in discussing synthesis, for example, but never plays it out to its logical conclusion.
The search in the Common Core Math Standards for valid “learning progressions” is a similar quest, but made more practical by grounding it in student work on recurring mathematical ideas.
Nonetheless, this is all difficult stuff and no satisfactory solution exists thus far to permit us to effectively map out courses in a true developmental fashion.
I wonder if many of these same misunderstandings or future criticisms are also applicable to Marzano’s take on the taxonomy.
A later post when I propose that all attempts at Taxonomies must fail if they are unidimensional.
Reblogged this on napoleon707's Blog.
Great post. My questions is this. In your opinion, how does one learn the application peice without the prompting? I find the gap between our C & B students is the (with assistance). The B students, have the skills or strategies and know how to effectively problem solve.
There has to be initial prompting, but it must gradually be lessened (The Gradual Release of Teacher Responsibility is how it gets labeled in early literacy research). Think of how it happens in athletics or driver’s ed: you are given simplified protocols or moves, then you must slowly perform on your own with increased autonomy of judgment.
I saw a great example of this in a district in NJ where they required writing under exam conditions each Wednesday. Initially they prompted everything concerning pre-writing and self-assessment via checklists. By spring, the kids were just given the writing prompt. Their scores jumped 25% in one year of such a process.
You are correct, then: the weaker students cannot just be thrown in the pool and told to swim. But we need to let everyone know that by spring they will be trusted to be completely on their own. (Note that in sports, we don’t wait: after a few weeks of practice, you get your first game; then you have a season of games-practices cycles to become more autonomous and skilled.)
Reblogged this on Ideas Out There and commented:
An excellent post which urges teachers to take a little bit more care when using Bloom’s taxonomy.
Another little known and less acknowledged fact is that, what we know as blooms taxonomy is only one of three taxonomies he developed – it is the taxonomy for the cognitive domain – why is the taxonomy for the AFFECTIVE domain never referred to in education? Is emotional learning and development not relevant to education of young human beings grappling with emotional realities? And what of the taxonomy for the psychomotor domain? Or is the body really merely, as Sir Ken Robinson mocked, a necessary apparatus to carry our heads around? I am astonished at the narrowness and conservatism of the dominance of blooms cognitive taxonomy in education.
Right you are. I should have thought of this one, but that’s the beauty of comments on blogs! (I was coming off a conversation involving ‘higher-order’ and so was focused on the cognitive domain…)
Bloom’s original taxonomy was significantly improved by his colleague,Krathwohl, and his student, Lori Anderson (see http://www.celt.iastate.edu/teaching-resources/effective-practice/revised-blooms-taxonomy/ ).
Crucially, this revised taxonomy develops four knowledge types (factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive). The first three are much like Tomlinson’s “K.U.D.s” (know understand and do). Each of the types of knowledge can vary in complexity. Being able to remember a concept is less complex than being able to use that conceptual understanding to choose the best option.
An alternative to using Bloom’s is to try SOLO, the Structured Organization of Learning Outcomes. When I was in New Zealand, a teacher there was using material by Pam Hooks (http://issuu.com/pamhook/docs/hooked_howto_infographic_finalnow_1/1?e=5487954/11866468) to assess student understanding that she developed from John Biggs’ original work. Some people might find it easier to use than Blooms.
I actually think the revised Taxonomy made matters worse. That’s another column. (It’s noteworthy that few people use it.)
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Reblogged this on ProfLearnSVC and commented:
Helpful pointers to common misconceptions about Bloom’s…
even get started.