Teaching Bloom's Taxonomy

Contributed by: Hannah Nelson

The Graduate Teaching Community (GTC) this past quarter read through Dr. SaundraYancy McGuire's Teach Students How To Learn. McGuire is the Director Emerita of the Center for Academic Success and retired Assistant Vice Chancellor and Professor of Chemistry at Louisiana State University. She has presented her widely acclaimed faculty development workshops at over 400 institutions in 46 states and ten countries. McGuire has received numerous awards for teaching and mentoring, including the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring, which was presented to her in a White House Oval Office Ceremony in 2007.

In Teach Students How To Learn, one of the primary strategies McGuire promotes for improving student metacognition ("thinking about thinking") and motivation is teaching students Bloom's Taxonomy. Bloom's Taxonomy is a set of three hierarchical models, often presented as pyramids, which are used to classify educational learning objectives into levels of complexity and specificity. The models are named after the American educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom, who chaired the committee of educators that devised the original taxonomy in 1956. The three models correspond to learning objectives in cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains, although the cognitive domain has been the primary focus of most education literature.

In the six decades since the taxonomy was originally conceived, it has undergone several refinements and extensions, including Bloom's Digital Taxonomy, which was developed by Andrew Churches in 2008 to create a hierarchy of learning activities for the digital environment. A revised version of the original taxonomy for the cognitive domain was created in 2001 by David Krathwohl and Lorin Anderson, which remains the most popular version of the taxonomy to date. In this revised framework, the six levels (from lower order to high order thinking skills) are remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create.

Although there have been many critiques of Bloom's taxonomy and alternatives exist (e.g., SOLO Taxonomy), Bloom's taxonomy is still frequently used by instructors to structure their curriculum learning objectives, assessments, and activities. But rather than just being a tool for teachers to develop their classes, McGuire advocates for teaching Bloom's Taxonomy to students as a learning strategy. In Teach Students How To Learn, she outlines how the taxonomy can be taught to students (in individual consultations or to a group) through a four-step process she developed:

1.      Ask, "What's the difference between studying and learning?"

2.      Ask, "Would you study harder to make an A on a test or teach the material to the class?"

3.      Present Bloom's taxonomy by explaining each level of the hierarchy and providing an example.

4.      Ask, "At what level of Bloom's have you been operating? At what level do you need to be operating now?"

The goal of the first two reflective questions is to have students identify different levels of learning and recognize that to pursue deep learning goals (e.g., mastery of the material) and ascend the levels of Bloom's taxonomy they must switch from "study"/"make-an-A" mode to "learn"/"teach-the-material" mode. The final question is intended for students to assess where they currently are in the hierarchy and determine where they need to be. McGuire argues throughout Teach Students How To Learn that when Bloom's taxonomy is presented as a learning strategies intervention in conjunction with other learning strategies, such as the study cycle, it becomes a power tool to increase student metacognition and motivation. The research linking these learning strategy interventions and student performance is still emerging, but the myriad of student success stories and testimonials presented throughout the book certainly attest to the efficacy of her approach.