Originally posted on November 13, 2018, on LindaSuskie.com
I’m mystified by how Bloom’s taxonomy has pervaded the higher education assessment landscape. I’ve met faculty who have no idea what a rubric or a test blueprint or a curriculum map is, but it’s been burned into their brains that they must follow Bloom’s taxonomy when developing learning goals. This frustrates me no end, because I don’t think Bloom’s is the best framework for considering learning outcomes in higher education.
Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives is probably older than you are. It was developed by Benjamin Bloom in the 1950s. It divides learning goals into three domains: cognitive, affective (attitudinal), and psychomotor. Within the cognitive domain, it has six levels. Originally these were knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. A 2000 update renamed these levels and swapped the positions of the last two: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. The last four levels are called higher order thinking skills because they require students to do more than understand.
So why don’t I like Bloom’s? One reason is that I’ve seen too many faculty erroneously view the six cognitive levels as hierarchy of prerequisites. Faculty have told me, for example, that first-year courses can only address knowledge and comprehension because students must thoroughly understand a subject before they can begin to think about it. Well, any elementary school teacher can tell you that’s bunk, but the misperception persists.
Even more important is that Bloom’s doesn’t highlight many of the skills and dispositions needed today. Teamwork, ethical judgment, professionalism, and metacognition are all examples of learning goals that don’t fit neatly into Bloom’s. That’s because they’re a combination of the cognitive and affective domains: what educators such as Costa & Kallick and Marzano and his colleagues call habits of mind.
I’m especially concerned about professionalism: coming to work or class on time, coming to work or class prepared to work, completing work on time, planning one’s time, giving work one’s best effort, self-evaluating one’s work, etc. Employers very much want these skills, but they get short shrift in Bloom’s.
So what do I recommend instead? In my workshops I suggest five categories of learning goals:
knowledge and understanding
career-specific thinking and performance skills
transferrable thinking and performance skills (the kinds developed in the liberal arts)
attitudes and values
habits of mind
But I also like the taxonomies developed by Dee Fink and by Marzano et al.
I wouldn’t expect every course or program to have learning goals in all five of these categories, of course. But I do suggest that no more than half of a course or program’s learning goals be in the knowledge and understanding category.
For more information, see Chapter 4 (Learning Goals: Articulating What You Most Want Students to Learn) in the new 3rd edition of my book Assessing Student Learning: A Common Sense Guide.