Introduction of Bloom27s Taxonomy布鲁姆的教育目标分类.doc

IntroductionBenjamin Bloom (1956) headed a group of educational psychologists develop a classification of levels of intellectual behaviour important in learning (i.e. Blooms taxonomy). This taxonomy was further developed by Lorin Anderson and his colleagues to a new version in 2001 (Blooms revised taxonomy). Till now Blooms taxonomy has been widely used in education. Specifically, educational objectives of Taxonomy have been adapted by educational administrators, teachers, teacher educators, curriculum coordinators, and assessment specialists across the board. Because of Blooms taxonomy, humans learning behaviour is not abstract but concrete and can be precisely delineated according to different affective, psychomotor, or cognitive levels. However, the objectives on cognitive domain are most commonly applied in education, and will be the focus of this assignment.With two aims of researching, i.e. what Blooms taxonomy contributes to understanding of students learning behaviour and what implications Blooms taxonomy casts on teaching and learning, this assignment is divided into three sections. In the first section, old and new versions of Blooms Taxonomy will be introduced accompanied by a comparison between the two. We then turn to describe how Taxonomy facilitates teaching and learning in curriculum design, classroom instructions, and assessments, drawing upon latest resources and examples from schools or educational institutes. In the third section, it will be pointed out that like every theory of learning and development Bloom taxonomy has weaknesses and limitations. It is just one method of describing and evaluating humans learning activities, thereby it is suggested to be used along with other educational approaches and with awareness to avoid the side effect of its weaknesses and limitations. Blooms Original TaxonomyBlooms Original Taxonomy comes from the efforts of a group of educational psychologists gathered by Benjamin S. Bloom, then Associate Director of the Board of Examinations of the University of Chicago, to reduce the labor of annually examination preparation by creating a framework to guide test items design that can be shared across American universities. This framework is a classification of educational objectives, i.e. what students are expected to behave as a result of learning. The practice of this framework then in 1956 came upon with the published Blooms Taxonomy.Bloom and his colleagues divided learning objectives into three psychological domains or areas: Cognitive domain, Affective domain, and Psychomotor domain, which sometimes are loosely described as knowing (or head), feeling (or heart) and doing (or hands) respectively. Specifically, skills in Cognitive domain involve knowledge, comprehension, and critical thinking; skills in Affective domain deal with attitudes, emotion, and feelings; and skills in the psychomotor domain focus on manipulative, manual or physical behaviour. Each domain is divided into several categories from lower-order skills to higher-order skills (see below figure 1). Figure 1: Blooms three psychological domains Cognitive skills Affective skills Psychomotor skills However, Bloom is best known for the research in cognitive domain. In this domain, cognitive processes were classified into six categories, i.e. Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. They are arranged in a cumulative hierarchy, which means the mastery of simple thinking skills is required prior to the mastery of complex ones. Furthermore, each main category was broken into subcategories except Application.With its precise classification of educational objectives, Blooms taxonomy makes it possible for teaching content and process to be formulated. It also provides a convenient and objective measurement for learning behaviours, which is helpful in enhancing educational quality. After having been put into practice for 45 years, Blooms taxonomy, however, has revealed weaknesses and limitations, thus in 2001, a new group of cognitive psychologists, educational researchers and testing specialists led by Blooms former student Lorin Anderson updated the taxonomy to a revised version. Blooms revised taxonomy drew on recent educational and psychological development in the 21st century and made it a more complete and practical educational method. Details will be given in the next section.Blooms revised taxonomyThe revised taxonomy was developed in much the same manner as the original one. It retained the same number (i.e. six) of cognitive processes and kept some of the original knowledge subjects. However, 12 changes have been made in emphasis, structure and terminology, and some changes are significant and will be discussed below.Firstly, with respect to emphasis, the revised taxonomy aims to serve a wide range of teachers, not only higher education teachers, who are focus of the original taxonomy, but also those from elementary and secondary education, thus it added examples from fundamental education. Another important shift of emphasis was from serving examinations to the taxonomy in use, i.e. the original taxonomy focused on assessments by providing abundant examples of test items whereas the revised taxonomy gives many examples of how the taxonomy is used in curriculum design, instruction, assessment and the alignment of the three. In addition, comparing with the original taxonomy in which the six major categories were given far more attention than the subcategories, the revised version described the latter in detail. This indeed could help teachers understand the nature of the six major categories more clearly (Krathwohl, 2002). Second, in terms of terminology, at first, the six major categories were changed from nouns to verbs (see figure 2). Specifically, Knowledge and Comprehension were renamed to Remember and Understand, Synthesis was retitled to Create, whilst Application, Analysis and Evaluation were changed to their verb forms Apply, Analyse, and Evaluate. Then the subtypes of each category were all replaced by their gerunds, called as cognitive processes (Anderson ed al., 2001, p64), to suit the way instructions are used by teachers, take Analyze for example, in the original version, it is Analysis consisting of Analysis of elements, Analysis of relationships and Analysis of organizational principles, while in the revised version it turned to be Analyze with subcategories Differentiating, Organizing and Attributing.Figure 2: A comparison between the Original Taxonomy and the Revised Taxonomy Original TaxonomyRevised TaxonomyThe third type and also the most significant changes are in structure.1) From one dimension to two dimensionsAs has been mentioned above, Blooms revised taxonomy has integrated the latest research on education and psychology (e.g. Constructivism, Self-regulated learning, and Metacognition) in 21st Century, most of which emphasize learners role in development and assumed that learners themselves are actively involved in the processes of learning. As Anderson ed al. (2001, p 38) put it passive views of taking learners as passive recipients and information recorders had been shifted towards more cognitive and constructivist perspectives emphasizes what learners know (knowledge) and how they think (cognitive process); therefore, in Blooms revised taxonomy, the categorization of objectives has been changed from one dimension to two-dimensions: Knowledge Dimension and Cognitive Dimension (see table 1). Table 1: The Two Dimensional Taxonomy TableThe Cognitive Process DimensionThe Knowledge Dimension1.Remember2.Understand 3.Apply4. Analyze 5. Evaluate 6. CreateA. FactualKnowledgeB. Conceptual KnowledgeC. ProceduralKnowledgeD. MetacognitiveKnowledge2) Knowledge dimensionIn the original taxonomy, Knowledge actually possesses both noun and verb aspects, the noun aspect was shown in its 9 subcategories and the verb aspect was explained in its definition (i.e. recall or recognize), but in the structure of the original taxonomy, the Knowledge category displays only noun aspect, say, subcategories like Knowledge of specific facts, Knowledge of classifications and categories. However, the other five major categories all show verb-noun relationship, say, subcategories like Analysis of organizational principles, Production of a plan, or proposed set of operations. Moreover, in teaching reality, instructional objectives are usually formulated by two parts: some subject matter content and a description of the deed to that content (Amer, 2006). So the revised taxonomy rectified this situation by separating the noun role of Knowledge to a new dimension Knowledge Dimension. From table 1, it could also been seen that a new Knowledge category Metacognitive knowledge has been added into the Knowledge dimension. As it has been mentioned above, the revised taxonomy had been influenced by recent educational development, this Metacognitive knowledge comes from Metacognition which is assumed to be cognition about cognition (Flavell, 1985, p.104). One important assumption on Metacognition is that it consists of two components, the firs component is knowledge about what skills, strategies and resources are required to complete a task (Schunk, 2008), whereas the second involves processes on how and when to apply the former cognitive knowledge to successfully complete a task (Pintrich, 2002), thus it could be inferred that Metacognitive knowledge correspond to the Knowledge Dimension and Cognitive Dimension of the taxonomy Table respectively. 3) Cognitive Dimension With respect to the structure of the Cognitive Dimension, the top two higher-order processes were interchanged, placing Create a higher level than Evaluate (see figure 2), supported by the statement of Anderson ed al., (2001, p.310) induction (involved in creating) is a more complex process than the deduction. Deduction involves breaking a whole into subparts, evaluating them, and determining whether criteria are met. Induction, on the other hand, involves finding things that could fit together, judging their appropriateness, and assembly them to best meet criteria. Notably, because Blooms revised taxonomy emphasizes its use among educational practitioners, it accordingly attaches more importance on teacher usage than developing a strictly cumulative hierarchy, thus Blooms revised taxonomy permits overlap of these categories.Blooms Taxonomy in UseAs has been mentioned above, Taxonomy precisely and systematically classified educational objectives by knowledge and cognitive dimensions, thereby allowing any knowledge, skills or strategies able to fit into at least one cell, i.e. an intersection of the knowledge and cognitive process categories, in the Taxonomy Table. This then made it a meaningful reference for educational practitioners to understand and reflect on their own teaching objectives, and also a useful measurement for them to determine how well educational objectives, assessment and instructional activities fit together. In other words, Blooms taxonomy is a common language about learning goals to facilitate communication across persons, subject matter, and grade levels, claimed by Bloom (cited in Krathwohl, 2002). Specifically, teachers can use Blooms taxonomy to:1) Analyze curriculum, standards or syllabusEvery school has curriculum, standards or syllabus they chose or provided by others, usually education administration departments. Most of the educational goals specified in these documents are broad and general and the interpretation is not easy. In this sense, the Blooms taxonomy could be taken as a basis for teachers to make sense of educational goals. Take English Curriculum Standards for Chinese Primary Schools and Junior/Senior Middle Schools (abbreviated to ECS ) (EMC, 2011) for example, there are five types of objectives in ECS: Language Skills, Language Knowledge, Attitudes to Learning, Cultural Awareness, and Learning Strategies. It can be seen that each of these goals could be classified into one of Taxonomys three domains, i.e. Cultural Awareness and Attitudes to Learning could be placed in Affective domain while Language Skills, Language Knowledge, and Learning Strategies belong to Cognitive domain. With reference to the taxonomys descriptions on each psychological domain, teachers can understand these knowledge, skills or strategies in ECS better. Then we can use Blooms taxonomy to analyze the general learning goals in ESC. These goals correspond to the definition of Global objectives given by Anderson ed. al. (2001, p15) as complex, multifaceted outcomes that require substantial time and instruction to accomplish. Take two general objectives for English students of grade five for example, students should be able to:l Use simple English greetings and exchange personal information and information about family and friends l Write simple sentences with the aid of pictures or promptsIn the first objective, the primary clues come from the verbs use and exchange. use could be easily fit into the cognitive processing Apply which has a subcategory Use, and exchange, it can be inferred to mean apply English knowledge to communicate information in English. Then the nouns greetings, personal information, and information about family fall in to Factual knowledge in the Knowledge dimension, as they belong to knowledge of specific details and elements which is the second subcategory of Factual Knowledge. So this objective could be placed in cell 3A (see table 2).In the second objective, the primary clue is the relationship between sentences and the aid of pictures or prompts, they are two different forms providing the same information, so the noun aspect of this objective could be put in the category of Conceptual knowledge which involves the interrelationships among the basic elements within a larger structure that enable them to function together. Then the verb write here is not to create a new product but means applying the language knowledge learned from the class and the information provided by the pictures or prompts to form simple sentences, falls in to Apply in the Cognitive dimension. So this objective could be placed in cell 3B (see table 2).Table 2: The placement in the Taxonomy Table of the English Curriculum Standards for Chinese Primary Schools and Junior/Senior Middle Schools for Grade fiveThe Cognitive Process DimensionThe Knowledge Dimension1.Remember2.Understand 3.Apply4. Analyze 5. Evaluate 6. CreateA. FactualKnowledgeB. Conceptual KnowledgeC. ProceduralKnowledgeD. MetacognitiveKnowledgeIn addition, it is noteworthy that, with using the taxonomy as a measurement, teachers are able to break Global objectives and Educational objectives into Instructional objectives, that is, the most specific objectives which focus on teaching and testing on narrow, day-to-day slices of learning in fairly specific content areas (Anderson ed. al., 2001), for example:l The student is able to differentiate among four common punctuation marks.l The student learns to add two one-digit numbers.l The student is able to cite three causes of the Civil War.In terms of motivational perspectives, specification of learning objectives to a great degree motivate the students, because it provides a clear and reachable day-to-day direction to move upwards, which meets the esteem needs and self-actualization according to Maslows theory of human motivation. In addition, if there is no plan week by week, day by day, the teacher may risk being distracted away from teaching the right content of the subject and abilities (Slavin,2006). 2) Design instructional activities or assessment On the basis of understanding the standards or syllabus, teachers then can use Blooms taxonomy to plan instructional activities or design assessments. Stated somewhat differently, Blooms Taxonomy processing categories could not only form a framework for the formulation of the objectives themselves, but also serve as means through which activities and assessment tasks could be formulated (Anderson ed al., 2001). Waters (2006) provided an interesting sequent of sample activities which well illustrated how instructional activities are planed with reference to different processing categories of Blooms taxonomy. These activities were intended for a class of 1011 year-old low-intermediate learners studying English as a foreign Language, and the learning objective is to help students be able to make simple instructions of constructing simple paper (origami) models with the use of the imperative, prepositions, and so on. See as the follows (note that this assignment has revised several of the original activities to fit them to the new taxonomy): CreateThink of a kind of paper model you havent made before (for example, of a spaceship, an angel, etc.). Then create instructions for constructing it.EvaluateRead the three instructions for constructing a paper model of a boat. Then judge which instruction is the best by giving reasons. AnalyzeUse the drawings you have been given to write a set of instructions for making a paper airplane.ApplyWhat form of the verb is used in imperatives? Look at the following examples and then complete the rule.Fold the paper in half.Cut the paper into three equal parts.UnderstandUse the instructions to make drawings of how to construct the boat.RememberPut these instructions for making a paper model of a boat in the right orderCognitive thinkingSample