Bloom's
Taxonomy
FROM:
Allen. T. (and others) (no date) ‘The taxonomy of
educational
objectives’, [online] www.humboldt.edu/~tha1/bloomtax.html (accessed
Cognitive
domain:
1. Knowledge:
recognize or
recall information ... ‘define, recall, recognize, remember, who, what,
where,
when’.
2. Comprehension:
... ‘describe,
compare, contrast, rephrase, put in your own words, explain the main
idea’.
3. Application:
... ‘apply,
classify, use, choose, employ, write and example, solve, how many,
which, what
is’.
4. Analysis:
... ‘identify
motives/causes, draw conclusions, determine evidence, support, analyze,
why’.
5. Synthesis:
... ‘predict,
produce, write, design, develop, synthesize, construct, how can we
improve,
what would happen if, can you devise, how can we solve’.
6. Evaluation: ... does not have
a
single correct answer ... objective criteria or personal values must be
applied. ... Some standard must be used ... differing standards are
quite
acceptable.
Bloom and his associates
also went on to specify the key stages in other important ‘domains’ of
academic
life as well. The ‘affective’ domain
refers to ‘affect’ in the technical way that term is used in psychology
-- that
is relating to opinions, values, emotional commitments, interests, and
attitudes. Bloom and his associates thought that students could also
make
progress in this area, which is usually thought to be too difficult to
define.
The stages here range from passively receiving or noting emotions and
interests, through responding and valuing them, to the final stages of
realizing how they are connected together and might be used
systematically to
generate whole ways of living -- maintaining ‘balance between freedom
and
responsibility’, accepting responsibility for your own behaviour,
showing self-reliance,
and so on (see Allen, no date).
Students undertaking
social science courses that involve motor skills (such as in
professions allied
to medicine or in sport) might be particularly interested to see the
work on
the ‘psychomotor domain’ as well.
Here, the focus is on performance, its development and control. There
are
stages of development in this domain too, ranging from mastering basic
movements to the development of perceptual and physical abilities to
permit
‘complex adaptive skills’ (Allen, no date). We are talking about
obvious
applications like physical skills here, but also ‘expressive and
interpretive
movement’, music, performance and ‘non-discursive communication’ that
can be
found in many other areas.
Objectives
When you have
worked through this chapter, you should be
better able to:
•
Set the terms ‘open learning’, ‘distance learning’ and
‘flexible
learning’ in context.
•
Choose good reasons for developing flexible learning
components
in your teaching.
•
List the principal ingredients of a flexible learning
package.
•
Decide whether to adopt existing materials, or adapt them
to
your purposes, or compose new flexible learning materials.
•
Choose an effective and efficient strategy for developing
your
own flexible learning materials.
•
Interrogate flexible learning materials using a quality
checklist.
My own view is
that if objectives are specific they are educationally
trivial, and if they are
educationally non-trivial they are not specific.
Turn the following aim into objectives (ideally SMART ones).
What issues arise:
Example of a
concept map in course design from Novak et al 2006 ( actually, click here
and get the whole paper!)
