Anderson & Krathwohl’s Revised Blooms Taxonomy (2001)

 

Anderson & Krathwohl’s Revised Blooms Taxonomy (2001)

In 1956, Benjamin S. Bloom classified domains of human learning into three parts – cognitive (knowing or head), affective (feeling or heart) and psychomotor (doing or kinesthetic, tactile or hand/body) as the educational objectives. Bloom’s taxonomy dealt with the varied aspects of human learning and was arranged hierarchically, preceding from the simplest functions to those that are more complex. However, over a period of time, new ideas and insight emerged about teaching-learning processes. In order to reflect their changed insight, and yield of researches and to meet the needs of the teaching-learning scenario of the twenty-first century learners, Lorin. W. Anderson, a former student of Bloom and David. R. Krathwohl, one of the co-authors of Bloom’s book, led a team of experts in revising Bloom’s taxonomy. The result was published in 2001 in the form of a book- ‘A Taxonomy of Learning, Teaching and Assessing- A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives (New York- Allyn and Bacon)’. The revised taxonomy appears similar, yet with significant changes.

Anderson Krathwohl Blooms taxonomy:

Remembering: Learner’s ability to recall information

Understanding: Learner’s ability to understand information

Applying: Learner’s ability to use information in a new way

Analyzing: Learner’s ability to break down information into its essential parts

Evaluating: Learner’s ability to judge or criticize information

Creating: Learner’s ability to create something new from different elements of information

The Revised Taxonomy is Different in Three Ways-

1.Terminology:

· It is a shift from the noun to verb.

· The word knowledge was considered as a category of thinking and is replaced by remembering. Thinking is an active process and knowledge is the product of thinking. Knowledge is not viewed as a form of thinking.

· Comprehension is revised as understanding.

· Evaluating has replaced evaluation. The word synthesis was not very communicative about the learning actions. Therefore, it is replaced by creating and putting the learnt things together in a novel way.

· The sub categories of the six categories are all in the form of verbs.

(ii) Structure:

In Bloom’s taxonomy, one has to find some ways to cut across different subject areas as the nature and contents of each subject area are different. Based on the theory of cognitive psychology, Anderson and Krathwohl came up with four dimensions of knowledge.

The intersection of the knowledge dimension and cognitive process dimensions gives 24 cells making the taxonomy table two-dimensional crossing of rows and columns shows knowledge and cognitive process being equally important. Let us see the meaning of different dimensions of knowledge in the context of biological science.

Factual Knowledge is the knowledge that is basic to specific disciplines. This dimension refers to essential facts, terminology, details or elements students must know or be familiar with in order to understand a discipline or solve a problem in it.a) Knowledge of terminology (b) knowledge of specific details and elements.

Conceptual Knowledge is the knowledge of classifications, principles, generalizations, theories, models, or structures pertinent to a particular disciplinary area.(a) knowledge of classification (b) knowledge of principles and generalization (c) knowledge of theories, models and structures

Procedural Knowledge refers to information or knowledge that helps the students to do something specific to a discipline, subject, or area of study. It also refers to the methods of inquiry, very specific or finite skills, algorithms, techniques, and particular methodologies. (a) Knowledge of subject specific skills and algorithms (b) Knowledge of techniques and methods (c) Knowledge of criteria for determining when to use appropriate procedures

Metacognitive Knowledge is the awareness of one’s own cognition and particular cognitive processes. It is the strategic or reflective knowledge about how to go about solving problems, cognitive tasks, to include contextual and conditional knowledge and knowledge of self. (a) Strategic knowledge (b) cognitive tasks, including appropriate contextual and conditional knowledge, (c) self-knowledge.

Knowledge and Cognitive Dimensions of Bloom’s Taxonomy as revised by Anderson

 

	The Cognitive Process Dimension
	Remember	Understand	Apply	Analyze	Evaluate	Create
Factual Knowledge	List	Summarize	Classify	Order	Rank	Compile
Conceptual Knowledge	Describe	Interpret	Experiment	Explain	Assess	Plan
Procedural Knowledge	Tabulate	Predict	Calculate	Differentiate	Conclude	Compose
Metacognitive Knowledge	Appropriate use	Execute	Construct	Achieve	Action	Actualize

 

Thus, the structure is different in the following ways:

(a) One dimensional taxonomy is revised in two dimensional forms.

(b) The order of synthesis and evaluation is interchanged as the taxonomy is considered to reflect thinking levels in increasing order of complexities. Creative thinking (synthesis) is more complex form of thinking than critical thinking (evaluation). One can have critical thinking (judging and justifying ideas or things) without being creative (accepting or rejecting ideas to create new ideas or things).

(c) In Bloom’s taxonomy, evaluation was the upper most level of thinking. In the revised taxonomy, creating is at the top in the hierarchy.

(iii) Emphasis:

(a) The revised taxonomy is more authentic tool for curriculum planning, developing materials for teaching, and assessment process.

(b) Bloom’s taxonomy was viewed as the tools best applied in the earlier years of schooling. Anderson and Krathwohl taxonomy can easily be used for higher level also. In this sense, it is broader in use.

(c) Emphasis is more on the description of the subcategories of learning.

For example-

(i)                 Recognizing- Locating knowledge in memory that is consistent with the presented material.

(ii)              Recalling- Retrieving relevant knowledge from long term memory.

Thus, we see that the revised Bloom’s taxonomy has a number of subcategories of the cognitive processes. It is more explicit and provides a powerful tool to help in structuring the teaching-learning strategies and processes.

Criticism 

The levels of knowledge were indicated in Bloom’s original work – factual, conceptual, and procedural – but these were never fully understood or used by teachers because most of what educators were given in training consisted of a simple chart with the listing of levels and related accompanying verbs. Anderson’s revised Bloom’s Taxonomy omits several points within the cognitive dimension and the knowledge dimension. The organizing process is missing. The sequence of cognitive processes should be reconsidered. Remembering level should be sub-divided. The difficulty level for analysis, organize and application should be replaced. A principle type of knowledge has been omitted.