The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited

1. Presented by Ana Gorea
ETRC, November 4, 2008

2. The mind is not a vessel
to be filled, but a fire to
be ignited.
(Plutarch)

3. Bloom’s Taxonomy - history
 In 1956 Benjamin Bloom headed a group
of educational psychologists who
developed a classification of levels of
intellectual behavior important in
learning;
 The research showed that 95 % of the test
questions required students to think only
at the lowest level, i.e. to recall
information

4. The original Bloom’s taxonomy
evaluation
synthesis
analysis
application
comprehension
knowledge

5. The six levels
 Knowledge
 Comprehension
 Application
 Analysis
 Synthesis
 Evaluation

6. Description
Appraise, critique, judge,
justify, argue, support
Make judgments about
value
evaluation
Categorize, generalize,
reconstruct
Put ideas together to form
something new
synthesis
Compare/contrast, break down,
distinguish, select, separate
Break information or
concepts into parts to
understand it more fully
analysis
Build, make, construct, model,
predict, prepare
Use the information or
concept in a new situation
application
Summarize, convert, defend,
paraphrase, interpret, give
examples
Understand the meaning,
paraphrase a concept
Comprehen-
sion
Identify, describe, name, label,
recognize, reproduce, follow
Recall information
knowledge
key words
definition
skill

7. Need for revision
 The world is a different place;
 Educators have learned a great deal
more about how students learn and
teachers teach;
 Teaching and learning encompasses
more than just thinking.

8. Marzano’s critique of Bloom’s
taxonomy (2000)
 A hierarchical taxonomy implies that
each higher skill is composed of the
skills beneath it;
 This is not true of the cognitive
processes in Bloom’s taxonomy;
 Nearly all complex learning activities
require the use of several different
cognitive skills.

9. Strengths of Bloom’s taxonomy
 It has taken the very important topic of
thinking and placed a structure around
it that is usable by practitioners;
 Teachers who keep a list of question
prompts encourage higher-order
thinking skills in their students

10. Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy
 In 1999, Dr. Lorin Anderson, a former student
of Bloom’s, and his colleagues published an
updated version of Bloom’s taxonomy that
takes into account a broader range of factors
that have an impact on teaching and
learning.
 The revised taxonomy differentiates between
“knowing what”, the content of thinking and
“knowing how”, the procedures used in
solving problems.

11. Knowledge Dimension
“knowing what”
 Has four categories:
- Factual
- Conceptual
- Procedural
- Metacognitive (self-awareness, knowledge
and experience we have about our own
cognitive processes)

12. Knowledge Dimension
“knowing what”
 Factual knowledge includes isolated bits of
information, such as vocabulary definitions
and knowledge about scientific details;
 Conceptual knowledge consists of systems
of information, such as classifications and
categories;

13. Knowledge Dimension
“knowing what”
 Procedural knowledge includes algorithms,
heuristics or rules of thumb (educated
guesses, intuitive judgment), techniques, and
methods as well as knowledge about when
to use these procedures;
 Metacognitive knowledge refers to
knowledge of thinking processes and
information about how to manipulate these
processes effectively.

14. The Cognitive Process Dimension
of the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy
 Has six skills from simplest to most complex:
- Remember
- Understand
- Apply
- Analyse
- Evaluate
- Create

15. The Cognitive Process Dimension
 Remembering consists of recognizing and
recalling relevant information from long-term
memory;
 Understanding is the ability to make your
own meaning from educational material such
as reading and teacher explanations. The
subskills for this process include interpreting,
exemplifying, classifying, summarizing,
inferring, comparing and explaining;

16. The Cognitive Process Dimension
 Applying refers to using a learned procedure
either in a familiar or new situation;
 Analysis consists of breaking knowledge
down into parts and thinking about how the
parts relate to its overall structure. Students
analyse by differentiating, organizing and
attributing.

17. The Cognitive Process Dimension
 Evaluation includes checking and critiquing;
 Creating, not included in the earlier
taxonomy, is the highest component of the
new version. This skills involves putting
things together to make something new. To
accomplish the creating tasks, learners
generate, plan, and produce.

18. The Cognitive Process Dimension
 According to this taxonomy, each level of
knowledge can correspond to each level of
cognitive process, so a student can
remember factual or procedural knowledge,
understand conceptual or metacognitive
knowledge, or analyze metacognitive or
factual knowledge

19. Original Terms New Terms
 Evaluation
 Synthesis
 Analysis
 Application
 Comprehension
 Knowledge
•Creating
•Evaluating
•Analysing
•Applying
•Understanding
•Remembering

20. Change in Terms
 The names of six major categories were changed
from noun to verb forms.
 As the taxonomy reflects different forms of
thinking and thinking is an active process verbs
were more accurate.
 The subcategories of the six major categories
were also replaced by verbs.
 Some subcategories were reorganised.
(

21. Change in Terms
 The knowledge category was renamed.
Knowledge is a product of thinking and was
inappropriate to describe a category of thinking
and was replaced with the word remembering
instead.
 Comprehension became understanding and
synthesis was renamed creating in order to better
reflect the nature of the thinking described by each
category.

22. Change in Emphasis
 More authentic tool for curriculum planning,
instructional delivery and assessment.
 Aimed at a broader audience.
 Easily applied to all levels of schooling.
 The revision emphasises explanation and
description of subcategories.

23. Higher-order thinking by students involves
the transformation of information and
ideas. This transformation occurs when
students combine facts and ideas and
synthesise, generalise, explain,
hypothesise or arrive at some conclusion
or interpretation. Manipulating
information and ideas through these
processes allows students to solve
problems, gain understanding and
discover new meaning.

24. When students engage in the construction of
knowledge, an element of uncertainty is
introduced into the instructional process and the
outcomes are not always predictable; in other
words, the teacher is not certain what the
students will produce. In helping students
become producers of knowledge, the teacher’s
main instructional task is to create activities or
environments that allow them opportunities to
engage in higher-order thinking.
 The basic question is how to improve human thinking

25.  Although it received little attention
when first published, Bloom's
Taxonomy has since been translated
into 22 languages and is one of the
most widely applied and most often
cited references in education.

26. A good teacher makes
you think even when
you don’t want to.
(Fisher, 1998, Teaching Thinking)