Educators are always finding ways to encourage higher-order thinking skills among learners. With higher-order thinking skills, learners will be able to solve problems more effectively and efficiently. Bloom’s Taxonomy is a framework that many educators use to promote these higher-order thinking skills among students.
What is Bloom’s Taxonomy?
Bloom’s Taxonomy is a framework for learning, teaching, and educational achievement which classifies learning stages from remembering facts to creating new ideas based on the acquired knowledge. Bloom’s Taxonomy is hierarchical - learning at the higher levels is dependent on attaining the knowledge and skills at the lower levels. For example, learners must have mastered basic knowledge about a subject before they start applying their knowledge. Bloom’s Taxonomy is often presented in the form of a pyramid, as seen in the graphic below:
Each level acts as a crucial building block for the following level. Educators regularly use Bloom’s Taxonomy to ensure that they are delivering appropriate assessments during each stage of the learning process.
What are the different stages in Bloom’s Taxonomy?
There are 6 stages in Bloom’s Taxonomy:
Remember: Learners need to retrieve, recognize, and recall relevant knowledge from long‐term memory.
Understand: Learners need to construct meaning from oral, written, and graphic messages through interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing, and explaining.
Apply: Learners need to carry out or use a procedure for executing, or implementing.
Analyze: Learners need to break material into constituent parts, and determine how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose through differentiating, organizing, and attributing.
Evaluate: Learners need to make judgments based on criteria through checking and critiquing.
Create: Learners need to put elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new structure through generating, planning, or producing.
How does Team-based Learning adhere to Bloom’s Taxonomy?
In Team-based Learning, learners need to recall the information they have acquired in the prework before attempting the IRAT and TRAT. This adheres to the ‘Remember’ level in Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Once that level is conquered, learners can then move on to the ‘Understand’ and ‘Apply’ levels in Bloom’s Taxonomy. Learners will need to explain and discuss their ideas in detail through applying what they have learned during the individual and team quizzes, as well as when clarifying their doubts with the instructor.
During Team Application, learners must draw connections between ideas in the ‘Analyze’ level of Bloom’s Taxonomy. In the ‘Evaluate’ level, learners must justify a stand by defending with their thoughts based on the knowledge they have acquired thus far.
Lastly, in the ‘Create’ level, learners need to evaluate their teammates on their performance throughout the TBL classes.
All in all, Bloom’s Taxonomy is a powerful tool that encourages higher-order thinking skills among learners. The framework also allows educators to identify clear instructional goals corresponding to each level and create plans to achieve them.