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Bloom's Taxonomy

Theory · All theories
Evidence · 9 claims (4 for, 3 mixed, 2 against) · 8 studies (3 causal, 3 design, 2 associational), q1–q3 · 0 of 8 report an effect size · 9 claims rest on one study

Description

Benjamin Bloom (1913-1999), working with his mentor Ralph W. Tyler at the University of Chicago and with collaborators Engelhart, Furst, Hill, and Krathwohl, published Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Handbook I, The Cognitive Domain in 1956, followed by a second handbook on the affective domain in 1964 (Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia, 1973). Bloom et al. (1956) identified three domains of educational goals — often summarized as KSA:

  • Cognitive Domain — mental skills (Knowledge)
  • Psychomotor Domain — manual or physical skills (Skills)
  • Affective Domain — growth in feelings or emotional areas (Attitudes)

Each domain is organized as a hierarchy running from the simplest behavior to the most complex, on the premise that lower levels must generally be mastered before the next level can take place — though this strict hierarchical assumption has drawn criticism (see below). Bloom et al. (1956) produced a detailed compilation for the cognitive and affective domains but explicitly omitted the psychomotor domain, citing their own lack of experience teaching manual skills at the college level; other researchers later filled this gap with at least three competing psychomotor models (Simpson, 1972; Dave, 1970; Harrow, 1972).

The Cognitive Domain

The original (1956) cognitive domain has six levels, from simplest to most complex: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation — each paired with characteristic key words useful for writing objectives: Knowledge (defines, lists, recalls, states), Comprehension (explains, summarizes, translates), Application (applies, computes, solves), Analysis (compares, differentiates, distinguishes), Synthesis (composes, designs, generates), Evaluation (appraises, critiques, justifies).

In the mid-1990s, Lorin Anderson (a former student of Bloom's) and David Krathwohl revised the cognitive domain (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001; Anderson et al., 2000), making three changes: renaming the levels from nouns to verbs, reordering the top two levels, and adding a Knowledge Dimension. The revised levels are Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, Creating — swapping the original "Synthesis" and "Evaluation" so that Creating (synthesis-like) sits above Evaluating, on the reasoning that creating something new is a more demanding cognitive act than judging existing material.

Original (1956) Revised (2001) Example (Goldilocks and the Three Bears)
Knowledge: recall data or information Remembering: recall or retrieve previously learned information List three things Goldilocks did in the three bears' house
Comprehension: understand meaning, interpret, translate Understanding: comprehend the meaning, translation, interpretation of instructions and problems Explain why Goldilocks liked the little bear's chair best
Application: use a concept in a new situation Applying: use a concept in a new situation or unprompted use of an abstraction Predict what Goldilocks might have used if she had entered your house
Analysis: separate material into component parts Analyzing: separate material or concepts into component parts so the organizational structure may be understood Select the part of the story where Goldilocks seemed most comfortable
Synthesis: build a structure or pattern from diverse elements (moved below Evaluating, renamed) Creating: build a structure or pattern from diverse elements Tell how the story would have been different if it had been about three fish
Evaluation: judge the value of ideas or materials Evaluating: make judgments about the value of ideas or materials Decide whether Goldilocks was a bad girl, and justify your position

The revised levels pair with their own characteristic key words — e.g., Remembering: defines, identifies, lists, recalls; Understanding: explains, summarizes, paraphrases; Applying: demonstrates, solves, uses; Analyzing: compares, differentiates, distinguishes; Evaluating: critiques, defends, justifies; Creating: designs, composes, formulates (Clark, 2015a).

Cognitive Process and Knowledge Dimension Matrix

The revised taxonomy also crosses the six cognitive processes with a Knowledge Dimension, adding a fourth knowledge type (metacognitive) to the three Bloom's original work had mentioned only in passing:

  • Factual — the basic elements a learner must know to be acquainted with a discipline or solve problems
  • Conceptual — the interrelationships among basic elements within a larger structure that let them function together
  • Procedural — how to do something: methods of inquiry, and criteria for using skills, algorithms, techniques, and methods
  • Metacognitive — knowledge of cognition in general, and awareness of one's own cognition (see Metacognition)

Crossing these four knowledge types against the six cognitive processes produces a 4×6 matrix (Krathwohl & Anderson, 2001) that functions as a performance-aid for writing precise objectives — e.g., a cell at Factual × Remembering might be "list," while Metacognitive × Create might be "actualize." A related five-part knowledge scheme (facts, concepts, processes, procedures, principles) is also used by some instructional designers (Clark & Chopeta, 2004; Clark & Mayer, 2007) as an alternative to the four-part matrix.

The Psychomotor Domain

Because Bloom et al. (1956) did not produce a psychomotor model, at least three independent hierarchies have been proposed. Simpson (1972), the model most commonly treated as primary, proposes seven levels: Perception (using sensory cues to guide motor activity), Set (mental/physical/emotional readiness to act), Guided Response (early imitation and trial-and-error), Mechanism (habitual, moderately confident performance), Complex Overt Response (skillful, quick, accurate, largely automatic performance), Adaptation (modifying well-developed skills to fit new requirements), and Origination (creating new movement patterns for a novel problem). Dave (1970) proposes five levels — Imitation, Manipulation, Precision, Articulation, Naturalization (performance becomes second-nature). Harrow (1972) proposes six — Reflex Movements, Fundamental Movements, Perceptual Abilities, Physical Abilities (fitness), Skilled Movements, and Non-discursive Communication (expressive use of gesture and body language).

The Affective Domain

The affective domain (Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia, 1973) covers feelings, values, appreciation, enthusiasm, motivation, and attitude, in five levels from simplest to most complex: Receiving Phenomena (willingness to hear, selective attention) → Responding to Phenomena (active participation, e.g. participating in discussion) → Valuing (attaching worth to an object or behavior, from simple acceptance to commitment) → Organizing (building a value system by comparing, relating, and resolving conflicts among values) → Internalizing Values (a value system that consistently, predictably controls behavior — the value has become characteristic of the person).

Uses and Matching Instructional Strategy to Taxonomy Level

The taxonomy is most often used to write lesson objectives, learning goals, and instructional activities pitched at a target level of complexity, and to design assessment questions that match that level. An Instructional Strategy Selection Chart (Clark, 2015d) maps strategy type to the level being targeted across all three domains: passive methods (lecture, reading, demonstration) suit the lowest levels (Knowledge/Remembering, Perception/Set, Receiving Phenomena); active methods (practice with coaching, simulated settings) suit the middle levels; use in real situations and self-directed, informally-acquired learning (with mentoring/coaching to speed the process) suit the highest levels (Evaluation/Creating, Origination, Internalizing Values). The general pattern: lower levels of performance can normally be taught with more passive learning methods, while higher levels usually require some action or involvement by the learner.

Application in the Classroom

Bloom's taxonomy helps a teacher target a student's Zone of Proximal Development in the sense meant by Vygotsky: a student who knows few terms for a topic (stuck at Knowledge/Remembering and Comprehension/Understanding) may need support remembering and defining terms before they can make useful comparisons (Analysis/Analyzing). The teacher arranges the zone of proximal development that makes the higher-level task reachable, but the student still has to construct the comparison for themselves (Arduini-Van Hoose, 2020).

Criticisms

As Morshead (1965) pointed out on publication of the affective-domain handbook, the classification lacked a systematic rationale of construction — a critique later acknowledged in the taxonomy's own 2001 revision, which reestablished it on more systematic lines. Some critics accept the six cognitive categories but question whether they form a genuine sequential hierarchy (Paul, 1993); educators sometimes over-read the hierarchy and mistakenly treat the lowest levels as unworthy of teaching, when in some fields (e.g., species identification in natural history) the lower levels are themselves the most important skill (Flannery, 2007; Lawler, 2016) — the lower levels enable building the higher ones, an application of Vygotskian scaffolding (Keene, Colvin, & Sissons, 2010; Vygotsky, 1978). Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) themselves argue the three lowest levels are hierarchically ordered but the three higher levels are parallel rather than strictly sequential; others argue it can be pedagogically better to move to Application before formally introducing a concept (Tomei, 2010), aligning with problem-based approaches that put real-world context before theory. More broadly, the clean separation of cognitive processes into discrete categories can be seen as artificial, since any real cognitive task typically draws on several categories at once, and any attempt to cleanly classify cognition risks understating its holistic, interconnected nature (Fadul, 2009) — a criticism applicable to taxonomies of mental process generally.

Implications

Context

Requirements

  • Most useful when writing precise, assessable learning objectives, and when selecting instructional strategies matched to a target level of complexity

Constraints

  • The apparent strict hierarchy can mislead teachers into treating lower levels as unimportant busywork, when in some domains the lower levels are the core skill
  • The clean level-by-level classification is an analytical convenience; real tasks usually draw on multiple levels/domains simultaneously

Target Learners

  • Applicable across all ages and grade levels — the framework structures the objective, not the learner population
  • Broadly applicable across K-12, higher education, and workplace/corporate training — the taxonomy's own worked examples span classroom tasks (writing an essay) and workplace tasks (hiring the most qualified candidate, calculating vacation time)

Target Learning Objectives

  • Writing objectives at a deliberately targeted level of cognitive, psychomotor, or affective complexity, and sequencing instruction from lower to higher levels within a domain
  • Objectives classifiable by cognitive complexity (recall through creation), by domain (knowledge, skill, or attitude), and, in the revised cognitive-domain matrix, by knowledge type (factual, conceptual, procedural, metacognitive) — this is the taxonomy's most directly actionable use

Claims

The evidence by question

Examples

Key Sources

  • Bloom, B. S. (Ed.), Engelhart, M. D., Furst, E. J., Hill, W. H., & Krathwohl, D. R. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives, Handbook I: The cognitive domain. David McKay Co.
  • Krathwohl, D. R., Bloom, B. S., & Masia, B. B. (1973). Taxonomy of educational objectives, the classification of educational goals. Handbook II: Affective domain. David McKay Co.
  • Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (Eds.). (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives. Allyn & Bacon.
  • Anderson, L. W., Krathwohl, D. R., Airasian, P. W., Cruikshank, K. A., Mayer, R. E., Pintrich, P. R., ... Wittrock, M. C. (2000). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives. Addison Wesley Longman.
  • Simpson, E. J. (1972). The classification of educational objectives in the psychomotor domain. Gryphon House.
  • Dave, R. H. (1970). Psychomotor levels. In R. J. Armstrong (Ed.), Developing and writing behavioral objectives (pp. 20-21). Educational Innovators Press.
  • Harrow, A. (1972). A taxonomy of psychomotor domain: A guide for developing behavioral objectives. David McKay Co.
  • Clark, D. R. (2015a-d). Bloom's taxonomy of learning domains. Retrieved from http://nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html
  • Clark, R., & Chopeta, L. (2004). Graphics for learning: Proven guidelines for planning, designing, and evaluating visuals in training materials. Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer.
  • Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2007). E-Learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons.
  • Morshead, R. W. (1965). On Taxonomy of educational objectives Handbook II: Affective domain. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 4(1), 164-170. doi:10.1007/bf00373956
  • Paul, R. (1993). Critical thinking: What every person needs to survive in a rapidly changing world (3rd ed.). Sonoma State University Press.
  • Flannery, M. C. (2007, November). Observations on biology. The American Biology Teacher, 69(9), 561-564. doi:10.1662/0002-7685(2007)69[561:OOB]2.0.CO;2
  • Lawler, S. (2016, February 26). Identification of animals and plants is an essential skill set. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/identification-of-animals-and-plants-is-an-essential-skill-set-55450
  • Keene, J., Colvin, J., & Sissons, J. (2010, June). Mapping student information literacy activity against Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive skills. Journal of Information Literacy, 4(1), 6-21. doi:10.11645/4.1.189
  • Tomei, L. A. (2010). Designing instruction for the traditional, adult, and distance learner: A new engine for technology-based learning. IGI Global.
  • Fadul, J. A. (2009). Collective learning: Applying distributed cognition for collective intelligence. The International Journal of Learning, 16(4), 211-220.
  • Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.
  • Zhou, M., & Brown, D. (Eds.). (2015). Bloom's taxonomy. In Educational learning theories (2nd ed.). GALILEO Open Learning Materials.
  • Arduini-Van Hoose, N. (2020). Constructivism in the classroom. In Educational psychology. Retrieved from https://edpsych.pressbooks.sunycreate.cloud. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
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title Bloom's Taxonomy
description Bloom's Taxonomy classifies learning goals into cognitive, psychomotor, and affective domains, each organized as a hierarchy from simpler to more complex levels, to help teachers select objectives and match them to instructional strategies.
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