Update your Bloom's taxonomy

He comes in and out of fashion, but Benjamin Bloom and his taxonomy is still central to how schools think about thinking. Yet it has several limitations and is out of date. Let me explain.

Firstly, the evidence doesn’t fully support the assertion that there is a hierarchy of thinking skills. Nor that a higher–order skill is necessarily dependent on its predecessor.

Secondly, there’s a lot of confusion about his terms. For example Knowledge is at the bottom of the pile but many people argue that it should be at the top as this is what you end up with after all the other skills have been successfully employed. The root cause is that the original uses nouns to describe the skills.

One of his original 1951 team, David Krathwohl teamed up with Lorin Anderson to update the 50 year–old model. The first thing they did was substitute the nouns for verbs which made it much clearer.
Then they changed the order, recognizing the being able to Create is the highest skill of all. Along the way, their research showed that there is only evidence for the cumulative effect of the three middle skills. In other words, to successfully Analyse, you need to have been successful in Applying and also Understanding.

So when the old Bloom is trotted out at a training event, ask why the newish (2001) update isn’t being used. And if the trainer doesn’t know about it, pop up, show the graphic below and explain it!

Reference:  Moseley. D. et al (2005), Frameworks for Thinking, Cambridge University Press