Blooms Taxonomy

Thinking is the hardest work there is which is probably the reason why so few engage in it (Henry Ford)

History
Benjamin Bloom was an educational psychologist who in 1956 led a project designed to classify levels of behavior in learning.
Although named after Bloom, the publication followed a series of conferences from 1949 to 1953, which were designed to improve communication between educators on the design of curricula and examinations

Blooms Taxonomy- What is it?

Blooms Taxonomy is a classification of educational objectives used for developing higher level thinking skills. It is a process-oriented model that allows teachers to present ideas and concepts at many different levels to meet the needs of a variety of learners. It refers to a classification of the different objectives that educators set for students (learning objectives). Bloom's taxonomy divides educational objectives into three "domains": Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor (sometimes loosely described as knowing/head, feeling/heart and doing/hands respectively).
In addition to cognitive, or intellectual, behavior, Bloom and his team intended to classify levels of emotional and physical skills that affect learning. However, Bloom's Taxonomy, as used today, only concerns six levels of cognitive performance: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation

Blooms Taxonomy- How is it Used

There are Six levels of learning.
These levels build on one another. All these have to do with thinking. Level 1 is the lowest level while 6 is the highest level of thinking.

6 levels of the Taxonomy

Old 1 2 3 4 5 6 Knowledge Comprehension Application Analysis Synthesis Evaluation New Remembering Understanding Applying Analyzing Creating Evaluation

Advantages
Clearly, Blooms Taxonomy can help a teacher transform a student from a memorizer into a thinker. It may require additional time and effort to create more challenging lesson plans, ones that guide students to higher level thinking and learning. But there are rewards. Students learn and retain more, and the instructor has the satisfaction of seeing students succeed. Blooms taxonomy is not just limited to individuals in the field of education. It is applicable to everyone who is interested in developing their questioning skills and level of thinking as well. Being able to ask the right and effective questions in any given situation adds more knowledge and improves cognitive creativity. The use of higher order questioning (analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) is suggested for a better discovery of new learning concepts and knowledge. If we are asked questions that require personal viewpoints and inferences, our manner of thinking is improved. We are bound to think of initiatives and think out of the box apart from factual knowledge which is pretty easy to grasp. Once you gradually develop asking questions in a progressive level, it becomes simple for you to interact and provide responses based from higher level of questions as well.

Limitations
Invalidity Blooms taxonomy is almost 50 years old. It was developed before we understood the cognitive processes involved in learning and performance. The categories or levels of Blooms taxonomy (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) are not supported by any research on learning. The only distinction that is supported by research is the distinction between declarative/conceptual knowledge (which enables recall, comprehension, or understanding) and procedural knowledge (which enables application or task performance). Unreliability The consistent application of Blooms taxonomy across multiple designers/developers is impossible. Given any learning objective, it might be classified into either of the two lowest levels (knowledge or comprehension) or into any of the four highest levels (application, analysis, synthesis, or evaluation) by different designers. Equally, there is no consistency in what constitutes instruction or assessment that targets separate levels. A more reliable approach is to separate objectives and practice/assessment items into those that elicit or measure declarative/conceptual knowledge from those that elicit or measure task performance/procedural knowledge. Impracticality The distinctions in Blooms taxonomy make no practical difference in diagnosing and treating learning and performance gaps. Everything above the knowledge level is usually treated as higher-order thinking anyway, effectively reducing the taxonomy to two levels. The Content-by-Performance Alternative Recent taxonomies of objectives and learning object strategies distinguish among types of content (usually facts, concepts, principles, procedures, and processes) as well as levels of performance (usually remember and use). This content-by-performance approach leads to general prescriptions for informational content and practice/assessment such as those presented in Figure 1.