from Grant Wiggins and The The TeachThought staff
Face it – just read the list of the six levels of Bloom’s Taxonomyrather than the whole book which explains each level and the rationale behind the Taxonomy. Don’t worry, you’re not alone: this is true for most educators.
But this efficiency comes at a price. Many educators have the wrong idea about the taxonomy and its levels, as the following mistakes suggest. And perhaps the Common Core Standards’ greatest weakness is their avoidance of overemphasis in their use of cognitively focused verbs, consistent with the Taxonomy’s rationale.
1. The first two or three levels of the taxonomy involve “low-order” thinking, and the last three or four levels involve “higher-order” thinking.
This is false. The only lower-order goal is Knowledge, as it uniquely requires simple recall when tested. Moreover, it makes no sense to think that “Understanding” – 2n.d level – requires only lower order thought:
The essential behavior of interpreting is that, when given a communication, the student can identify and understand the main ideas involved in it, as well as understand their interrelationships. This requires good judgment and caution in relying on one’s own ideas and interpretations in the document. It also requires some ability to go beyond simply paraphrasing parts of the document to identify the larger and more general ideas within it. The interpreter must also recognize the limits within which interpretations can be made.
Not only this higher order thinking – summary, main idea, conditional and cautious reasoning, etc. – this is a level not reached by half of our students in reading. And by the way: the terms “lower order” and “higher order” do not appear anywhere in the Taxonomy.
2. “Application” requires practical training.
This is not true, a misinterpretation of the word “enforcement” as the text makes clear. We apply ideas to situations, for example you may understand Newton’s 3 Laws or the writing process, but can you solve new problems related to it – without prompting? This is an application:
The entire cognitive domain of the taxonomy is arranged in a hierarchy, i.e. each classification within it requires the skills and abilities that are lower in the classification order. The Application category follows this rule because applying something requires “understanding” the applied method, theory, principle, or abstraction. Teachers often say, “If a student really understands something, he can apply it.”
A problem in the comprehension category requires the student to know an abstraction well enough to be able to correctly demonstrate its use when specifically asked to do so. However, “implementation” requires a step beyond this. Given a problem new to the student, he will apply the appropriate abstraction without having to be prompted which abstraction is correct or without having to be shown how to do it in that situation.
Note the key phrases: Given a problem new to the student, he will apply appropriate abstraction without having to be prompted. So, “application” is really synonymous with “transfer”.
In fact, the authors strongly argue for the advantage of application/transfer of learning:
The fact that most of what we learn is designed to be applied to real-life problem situations is indicative of the importance of application goals in the general curriculum. Therefore, the effectiveness of much of the school curriculum depends on how well students transfer to situations applications that students have never encountered in the learning process. Those of you familiar with educational psychology will recognize this as the age-old problem of learning transfer. Research shows that understanding an abstraction does not guarantee that an individual will be able to apply it correctly. Students obviously also need practice in reframing and classifying situations so that the correct abstraction applies.
Why UbD is what it is. Application issues must be new; students must judge which prior learning is applicable, without prompts or hints from skeleton worksheets; and students must receive training and practice in how to deal with non-routine problems. We designed UbD, in part, backwards from Bloom’s definition of Application.
As for the instructions in support of the purpose of the transfer (and various types of transfer), the authors soberly note that:
“We also tried to organize some of the literature on the growth, retention, and transfer of different types of educational outcomes or behaviors. We find very little relevant research here. … Many claims have been made about various educational procedures … but they have rarely been supported by research findings.”
3. All verbs listed under each level of the taxonomy are more or less the same; they are synonyms of level.
No, there are separate sub-levels of the Taxonomy where the cognitive difficulty of each sub-level increases.
For example, under Knowledge, the lowest level form is Knowledge of Terminology, where the more demanding form of recall is Knowledge of basic ideas, schemas, and patterns in the field of study, and where the highest level of Knowledge is Knowledge of theories and structures (e.g. knowledge of the structure and organization of Congress.)
In comprehension, the three sublevels, in order of difficulty, are translation, interpretation, and extrapolation. The main idea in literacy, for example, falls into oral translation because it requires more than “translating” the text into one’s own words, as noted above.
4. Taxonomy does not recommend the goal of “understanding” in education.
Only in the sense that the term “understand” is too broad. Rather, the taxonomy helps us delineate more clearly the different levels of understanding we seek:
To return to the illustration of the term ‘understanding’, the teacher can use the taxonomy to decide which of several meanings he intends. If this means that the learner is … aware of a situation … to describe it in terms slightly different from those originally used to describe it, this would correspond to the taxonomic category ‘translation’ (which is a sublevel of Comprehension). Deeper understanding will be reflected in the next higher level of the Taxonomy, ‘interpretation’, where the student will be expected to summarize and explain… There are other levels of the Taxonomy that the teacher can use to indicate more deeper ‘understanding’. “
5. The authors of the Taxonomy were confident that the Taxonomy was a valid and complete Taxonomy
No, they weren’t. They note that:
“Our attempt to order educational behavior from simple to complex was based on the idea that certain simple behaviors can be integrated with other equally simple behaviors to form more complex behaviors. . . . Our evidence for this is not entirely satisfactory, but there is an unmistakable tendency towards a hierarchy of behaviour.
They were particularly concerned that no theory of learning and achievement—
“accounts for the variety of behaviors represented in the educational goals we have attempted to classify. We were reluctantly forced to agree with Hilgard that any theory of learning accounts very well for some phenomena but is less adequate in accounting for others. What is needed is a more synthetic theory of learning than currently appears to be available.
Later schemes – such as Webb’s Depth of Knowledge and the Revised Taxonomy – do nothing to address this fundamental problem, with implications for all modern standards documents.
Why does this all matter?
Perhaps the biggest failure of the Common Core Standards is the neglect of these issues through the arbitrary/sloppy use of verbs in the Standards.
There appears to have been no attempt at precision and consistency in the use of verbs in the standards, making it almost impossible for users to understand the level of rigor prescribed by the standard, hence the levels of rigor required in local assessments. (Nothing is said in any documents about how intentional these verb choices were, but I know from past experience in New Jersey and Delaware that verbs are used haphazardly—in fact, writing teams start changing verbs just to avoid repetition !)
The problem is already visible: in many schools, assessments are less rigorous than the standards and practice tests clearly require. No wonder the results are low. I’ll have more to say about this problem in a later post, but mine previous standards publications provide additional information about the problem we are facing.
Update: Already people are arguing with me on Twitter as if I agree with everything said here. Nowhere am I saying here that Bloom was right about the Taxonomy. (His doubts about his own work suggest my true views, don’t they?) I’m just 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.
This article first appeared on Grant’s personal blog; Grant can be found on twitter here; 5 Common Misconceptions About Bloom’s Taxonomy; flickr user to attribute image langwitches
