A New Look at Bloom’s Taxonomy
By Pat Franklin – Art Supervisor, NNPS
As educators we are all familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy. To summarize, in 1956, Benjamin Bloom headed a group of educational psychologists who developed a classification of levels of intellectual behavior considered important in student learning. What is not as familiar, but is gaining in notoriety, is the updated version of Bloom’s Taxonomy. During the 1990’s a new group of cognitive psychologists, lead by Lorin Anderson (a former student of Bloom’s), updated the taxonomy to reflect behavioral skills relevant to the 21st century. With the current trend on 21st Century career skills this revised version is attracting attention. The chart below is a representation of the new verbiage associated with the long familiar Bloom’s Taxonomy. Of particular importance is the shift from Nouns to Verbs to describe the different levels of the taxonomy. As educators it is important to note the shift in the top levels. Note that the top two levels are essentially exchanged from the Old to the New version. In the revised version the top level is now Creating.
Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy
ORIGINAL / REVISED
Evaluation / Creating
Synthesis / Evaluating
Analysis / Analyzing
Application / Applying
Comprehension / Understanding
Knowledge / Remembering
Here are the details of the revised taxonomy (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001) beginning at the bottom and moving to the higher order thinking skill of Creating.
-Remembering: Retrieving, recognizing, and recalling relevant knowledge from long-term memory
-Understanding: Constructing meaning from oral, written, and graphic messages through interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing, and explaining.
-Applying: Carrying out or using a procedure through executing, or implementing
-Analyzing: Breaking material into constituent parts, determining how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose through differentiating, organizing, and attributing
-Evaluating: Making judgments based on criteria and standards through checking and critiquing
-Creating: Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure through generating, planning, or producing
The essential question, grounded in the current educational climate of emphasis placed on test scores, becomes how to meet the needs of students to pass the test and also the 21st century need to develop their creative thinking skills? Arts educators are acutely aware that creative thinking involves creating something new or original. This process requires development of a mindset and skills including flexibility, originality, fluency, elaboration, brainstorming, modification, imagery, associative thinking, attribute listing, metaphorical thinking and envisioning forced relationships. The aim of creative thinking is to stimulate curiosity and promote divergent thinking. What better place to promote these practices than the visual arts classroom? In considering 21st Century skill development do not overlook the importance of a strong creative arts program to foster these important habits of mind. These skills can and do transfer to other subject areas. The essential question however remains, in the current educational climate of emphasis placed on test scores, how do classroom teachers meet the needs of students to pass the test and also the 21st century need to develop their creative skills? What paradigms need to shift to create educational environments allowing this flexibility in instruction?
May 14th, 2009 at 7:48 am
As an Art Educator it is well known, to us, that we have been doing this all along. In fact our entire program is built on this method of learning. We have to teach our students to analyze and see relationships between the curriculum and the arts.They must learn to recall the information that they have previously learned and recognize it is relevant to the process and retrieve it in order to have the MOST success. The execution of the process is based on seeing the relationships between those parts and evaluating and critiquing is valuable to the learning process. Creation by pulling all of those elements together to form a whole makes execution of that process successful!
May 14th, 2009 at 9:14 am
I think one of the downfalls of our current system is that we ignore the key factor in many students lives – relevance.
Our students may have a multitude of creative skills but do not see the need to recognize education as relevant to their lives. School is required but does not seem to be important. They know SO much about how to operate within all levels of creativity in their home settings. They have lived experiences beyond my own. Many have been left to fend for themselves from an early age and have little experience with finding their way in a cultured civilized society. Street survival rules their existence and they bring these rules to the classroom. Saving face, breaking bad and showing large are about maintaining their level of self esteem and street credibility. It is imperative we stop ignoring the existence of this other set of creative levels that our kids live by. Pushing test scores, SOL results and academia do not even begin to reach the root of their problems.
May 14th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
For many of the students that i work with through the student leadership department (discipline, attendance, homeless, youth involved in juvenile correction program) creativity starts first with them. Many can draw, write poetry, play music and sing. There are some forms of art work (considered vandalism) that demonstrate incredible artistic skill yet they have not found a place to express themselves in that same way in our schools. If we could harness that interest and teach essential skills at the same time, I believe we would keep these students rather than losing them to the streets or as drop outs. Many disenfranchised students want to learn but need a jump start called allowing for creativity that they understand also while building in relevance. WE are beginning to even see students lose interest in school because frankly they are bored or do not feel attached to the school environment. We can throw out hands up in the air and say too bad that they dont feel the fit….we can say it is too difficult to start first with creativity….or we can begin to grab ahold of the 21st Century needs of adults and youth and in turn develop the communities that we all wish to live in.
May 15th, 2009 at 8:42 am
I think this is an area where technology integration into the content area comes to the forefront. If we are actually using the higher levels of revised Bloom’s in our lesson construction, then we start to view students as creators of content rather than consumers of information (the traditional view). This means that our students demonstrate their understanding of what we have taught, and what we are teaching, in much more creative ways: Digital Storytelling vs. a report, a PowerPoint presentation vs. a poster, a podcast or a collaborative wiki vs. a set of question items or a worksheet. If we tap into our students’ creative potential when we design lessons, we are more likely to have engaged students (and therefore fewer discipline problems!)
May 15th, 2009 at 8:56 am
An addition to my post- this is a GREAT article from the Tech & Learning online journal that shows the revised Bloom’s Teaxonomy, with the digital products and their explanations added. Another TCIS, Sarah Garritty, just shared it with our group and I thought it was an excellent resource to be shared out.
May 15th, 2009 at 8:57 am
Live and learn with the blog
You have to click my name to see the link. Here’s the link in non-embedded format:
http://techlearning.com/article/8670