Another run at Bloom

A couple of years ago, I did a quick post on Bloom’s taxonomy and how it might be updated. The Bloom 2.0 that is mentioned there has been prettied up and rehashed here. The revisit offers up some solid options as to how one might go about implementing the use of this updated taxonomy in the classroom. For example:

• Remembering – Recognising, listing, describing, identifying, retrieving, naming, locating, finding
• Understanding – Interpreting, Summarising, inferring, paraphrasing, classifying, comparing, explaining, exemplifying
• Applying – Implementing, carrying out, using, executing
• Analysing – Comparing, organising, deconstructing, Attributing, outlining, finding, structuring, integrating
• Evaluating – Checking, hypothesising, critiquing, Experimenting, judging, testing, Detecting, Monitoring
• Creating – designing, constructing, planning, producing, inventing, devising, making

Within each of these new levels, student can engage in activities like social bookmarking at the remembering level. At understanding, students can categorize. To apply, students can hack and edit (that is quite the jump). At the analysing stage, students can link (wha??… this is harder/more cognitively involved than hacking and editing??). To evaluate and create, the student may post and publish respectively (kinda wimpy it seems after hacking and editing). Now, granted I cherry picked the options for each of these stages to prove a point. One that Brenda Sugrue pointed out (thanks to @jharche) – that the system is invalid, unreliable and impractical.

I’ve commented on Donald Clark’s post on the subject that for it’s weaknesses, it is a good starting point for people who are not thinking about pedagogy. But as I’ve just shown, if you are just picking and choosing from a list that others have put together, you can very easily claim that you are teaching to a higher level by having students publish blog articles and post comments when in reality, they might not be doing as much as students at “lower” levels who are hacking and editing.This suggests that many instructors out there who are trying to pad their teaching can do so rather easily if those who are evaluating them don’t know what is really going on (what else is new?). I still think that Bloom provides a good starting point for those who understand what they are doing, but it certainly is an idea that is starting to show it’s age and it seems that we are in need of something new, based on new science.