In 1956, Benjamin. S. Bloom classified domains of human learning into three parts – cognitive (knowing or head), affective (feeling or heart) and psychomotor (doing or kinesthetic, tactile or hand/body) as the educational objectives. Blooms taxonomy dealt with the varied aspects of human learning and were arranged hierarchically, preceding from the simplest functions to those that are more complex.
However, over a period of time new ideas and insight emerged about teaching-learning processes. In order to reflect their changed insight and yield of researches and to meet the needs of the teaching-learning scenario of the twenty-first century learners, Lorin. W. Anderson, a former student of Bloom and David. R. Krathwohl, one of the co-authors of Bloom’s book, led a team of experts in revising Bloom’s taxonomy.
The result was published in 2001 in the form of a book- A Taxonomy of Learning, Teaching and Assessing- A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives (New york- Allyn and Bacon). The revised taxonomy appears similar, yet with significant changes.
The Revised Taxonomy is Different in Three Ways-
(i) Terminology:
1. It is a shift from the noun to verb.
2. The word knowledge was considered as a category of thinking and is replaced by remembering. Thinking is an active process and knowledge is the product of thinking. Knowledge is not viewed as a form of thinking.
3. Comprehension is revised as understanding.
4. Evaluating has replaced evaluation. The word synthesis was not very communicative about the learning actions. Therefore, it is replaced by creating, putting the learnt things together in a novel way.
5. The sub categories of the six categories are all in the form of verbs.
(ii) Structure:
In Bloom’s taxonomy, one has to find some ways to cut across different subject areas as the nature and contents of each subject area are different. Based on the theory of cognitive psychology, Anderson and Krathwohl came up with four dimensions of knowledge.
The intersection of the knowledge dimension and cognitive process dimensions gives 24 cells making the taxonomy table two-dimensional crossing of rows and columns shows knowledge and cognitive process being equally important. Let us see the meaning of different dimensions of knowledge in the context of biological science.
1. Factual knowledge- The basic elements that student must know to be acquainted with a discipline or solve a problem in it. (a) Knowledge of terminology (b) knowledge of specific details and elements.
2. Conceptual knowledge- The inter relationship among the basic elements within a layer structure that enable them to function together, (a) knowledge of classification (b) knowledge of principles and generalization (c) knowledge of theories, models and structures.
Procedural knowledge:
It deals with how to do something- methods of inquiry, and criteria for using skills, algorithms, techniques and methods.
(a) Knowledge of subject specific skills and algorithms.
(b) Knowledge of techniques and methods.
(c) Knowledge of criteria for determining when to use appropriate procedures.
Metacognitive Knowledge:
Knowledge of cognition in general as well as awareness of one’s own cognition.
(a) Strategic knowledge (b) cognitive tasks, including appropriate contextual and conditional knowledge, (c) self-knowledge
E.g. Knowing how to describe formation of the rainbow, so, that it is approved by the teacher can be one of the aspects of metacognitive learning.
Let us now see how procedural knowledge can be matched with cognitive process dimension with the help of the following example.
Thus, the structure is different in the following ways:
(a) One dimensional taxonomy is revised in two dimensional forms.
(b) The order of synthesis and evaluation is interchanged as the taxonomy is considered to reflect thinking levels in increasing order of complexities. Creative thinking (synthesis) is more complex form of thinking than critical thinking (evaluation). One can have critical thinking (judging and justifying ideas or things) without being creative (accepting or rejecting ideas to create new ideas or things).
(c) In Bloom’s taxonomy, evaluation was the upper most level of thinking. In the revised taxonomy creating is at the top of the hierarchy.
(iii) Emphasis:
(a) The revised taxonomy is more authentic tool for curriculum planning, developing materials for teaching and assessment process.
(b) Bloom’s taxonomy was viewed as the tools best applied for earlier years of schooling. Anderson and Krathwohl taxonomy can easily be used for higher level also. In this sense, it is broader in use.
(c) Emphasis is more on the description of the subcategories of learning.
For example-
(i) Recognizing- Locating knowledge in memory that is consistent with presented material.
(ii) Recalling- Retrieving relevant knowledge from long term memory.
The following table gives a comprehensive overview of the revised Bloom’s taxonomy. The sub categories of the cognitive process provide the form of learning actions and the possible learning products as a result of teaching-learning process.
Thus, we see that the revised Bloom’s taxonomy has a number of subcategories of the cognitive processes. It is more explicit and provides a powerful tool to help structure the teaching-learning strategies and processes.