We need to get over our slavish devotion to Bloom’s taxonomy.

Bloomin’ Bloom! The hero of cognitivism is everywhere in the course design world. I don’t think there’s a teaching centre that doesn’t put the taxonomy on display, usually as a pyramid and very often doubled (the 1950s original and the updated 2001version):

Others have criticized the taxonomy in more knowledgeable fashion than I ever could; Ron Berger’s critique in Education Week lays out the problems well. The taxonomy creates a hierarchy of learning from which many infer that the lower, broader categories are inferior to the higher, pointier ones (surely synthesis beats out comprehension in terms of difficulty? creating is much more significant than mere remembering?), even though Bloom saw knowledge as the basis for all other learning (or cognitive processes).

There are other renderings, such as these two from my own university’s Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE):

(Click either image to enlarge)
Bloom's Taxonomy and Bloom’s Taxonomy revised. Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0.

CTE’s own description of the taxonomy states bluntly “that the different levels of thinking defined within each domain of the Taxonomy are hierarchical. In other words, each level subsumes the levels that come before it.” Learning is about moving up the levels, thus the higher up the hierarchy you step, the more learned you are. This value-laden interpretation of the taxonomy ignores situations or instances where “lower order” learning is appropriate, necessary, and desired. Think of second language learning: language instructors often call it a good day when they can get their students to remember one vocabulary item for longer than two minutes.

Another issue many of us have with Bloom’s taxonomy is how it has come to dominate the articulation of course learning objectives. (This series of blogposts will have more to say about learning objectives later in the term - look for them in the “GER615” link above.) Many universities encourage using the taxonomy when writing learning objectives, and they even provide all sorts of action verbs to help the instructor along. At the University of Arkansas we learn how the taxonomy can keep learners in their place - not in a mean way, but so that they don’t get annoyed if the instructor pitches the learning at the wrong level: “Are lots of your students freshman? Is this an ‘Introduction to…’ course? If so, many [of] your learning objectives may target the lower order Bloom’s skills, because your students are building foundational knowledge. However, even in this situation we would strive to move a few of your objectives into the applying and analyzing level, but getting too far up in the taxonomy could create frustration and unachievable goals.”

It’s not that what the University of Arkansas (or almost every other university in Canada and the United States) is doing with Bloom’s taxonomy is wrong. They’re helping instructors organize their teaching in a manner that will meet students where they’re at. But the hierarchy is just too simplistic. It ignores the circularity of learning: students do not go straight up the side of pyramid or march up the stairs step by step. They go back and forth, up and down, sometimes every which way. They learn things we don’t intend them to learn but which are nonetheless valuable to them. They grasp some concepts deeply and can discuss them in a sophisticated manner, and other things just pass them by. They’re human, and sometimes they don’t do things according to the schema we’ve worked out for them.

There are other things about Bloom that irk. If you teach literature and read that “interpretation” is at the “comprehension” level, you might explode, as interpretation is the ultimate goal of literary study, and not many people are able to grasp its intricacies. Yet even reacting like that to the “level” of the ability to interpret underscores the difficulty we have of getting away from the hierarchical thinking that informs the taxonomy. Bloom’s taxonomy can help us organize our thoughts around the kinds of abilities and skills we are trying to bring to our students’ attention. But let’s give the slavish devotion to it a rest.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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