Bloom’s Taxonomy is derived from a study conducted by a committee of colleges headed by Benjamin Bloom. The purpose of the study was to categorize the goals of education. During the process, three learning domains were identified: cognitive, affective and psychomotor. Cognitive covers mental skills or knowledge; affective covers the development of emotions and psychomotor involves manual or motor skills. These three areas have also come to be known as Knowledge (for cognitive), Skills (for psychomotor), and Attitude (for affective), or KSA for short among teacher trainers. The three domains cover all areas of student learning across all subjects.

Today’s strategy focuses on the cognitive domain. This area of learning most represents traditional views of education. The cognitive domain is broken into 6 levels. These levels progress from easy to difficult. My teacher in graduate school likened the levels to an iceberg. Some levels are like the top of the iceberg: easy to see in our students. They often get the most attention because they are the easiest to produce. Other levels are below the surface of the water and therefore more difficult to see in our students and more difficult to produce. However, these hidden levels are more cognitively demanding and often show true understanding and internalization of content material.

Let’s start with the easy levels and work toward the more difficult levels. The first level is knowledge. In this level students simply recall information that they’ve learned or memorized. When we ask our students to do things like list, cite, group, write or identify, then we are asking them to perform at the most basic level of the cognitive domain.

The next level is comprehension. Here students can see relationships between ideas or events and relate these events to their own lives. Things we ask our students to do: expound, convert, reword, calculate or outline. The third level is application. Bloom describes application as the use of abstract forms in particular concrete situations. Students can relate or apply ideas to new or unusual situations. We ask our students to solve, develop, manipulate or relate when we ask them to perform at this level.

These three levels, knowledge, comprehension and application, constitute the levels on our iceberg that are above the surface of the water. It is easy to see our students perform at these cognitive levels. It is also very easy to write test questions that test knowledge at these levels. However, the next three levels are more challenging to elicit from our students because they require more time to prepare and more time to complete. These levels are the part of the iceberg that is below the surface of the water.

The fourth level is analysis. In analysis students look at patterns and identify the parts of a whole. When students perform at this level, we are asking them to dissect, simplify, scrutinize, compare of deduce. The fifth level of Bloom’s Taxonomy, synthesis, is often closely related to analysis. When students synthesize, they are thinking creatively, or divergently. They are forming new patterns or creating new or original things. To perform at this cognitive level we ask students to develop, generate, originate formulate or compose.

The last level is the most complex and therefore the deepest below the surface of the water. The sixth level is evaluation. At this level students make judgments based on criteria or they rate or rank ideas. When we ask students to evaluate, we ask them to criticize, classify, prioritize, accept or reject. This last level requires knowledge of basic facts, a comprehension of the relationships between ideas, the ability to apply ideas to a new situation, analysis of the parts or patterns, and synthesis of given things into something new or original. All the levels culminate in the evaluation level of the cognitive domain.

It’s vital that we recognize the part we, as teachers, play in the cognitive level at which our students perform. As student become more confident with the material we should guide their manipulation of that material so that their activities become increasingly cognitively challenging and complex. By asking students to analyze, synthesize and evaluate we are asking them to do something original with the material. The more students become invested in the concepts we teach, the better and easier they will remember them long after they’ve left our classrooms.