When reading Anderson & Krathwohl’s 2001 revised taxonomy of educational objectives, I really liked how they made clear that different kinds of knowledge require different instructional approaches as well as different kinds of assessment.

For example, if you were to teach remembering factual knowledge, you would probably spend quite some time reminding students of the details you want them to remember. You would probably also point out strategies that could help, like rehearsing facts, or techniques, like mnemonics.

To assess whether students remember factual knowledge, you might want to have them match lists of technical terms with definitions of those terms, drawings of technical parts with the names of those parts, or physical constants with their units or values.

If, on the other hand, you were to teach analyzing conceptual knowledge, good strategies would be to focus on categories and classifications so students get an idea of where a concept is located in the bigger landscape of the field they are currently studying. To better understand categories and classes, discussing examples as well as non-examples is helpful. Also, emphasizing the differences between categories helps.

To assess analysis of conceptual knowledge, you might want to give a new example of a member of a category you discussed in class. Then you might ask students which category the example belongs to, how they know which category it belongs to, or how you could modify the example so it matches a different category.

While you probably do a lot of this intuitively already, I find it helpful to think about the different categories in order to systematically find good instructional strategies. And it is especially helpful to remember that even though you might be able to classify your learning objective in one category, teaching that activity might require activities that belong to different categories. Especially, you might want to use complex processes to facilitate learning of simpler objectives.

For example when applying conceptual knowledge, you might want to give your students the chance to first classify the type of problem they are working on. Then, they should select the appropriate laws that describe the problem. Then, they need to implement the proper procedures to solve the problem. In order to be able to do that, they might need to recall meta-cognitive strategies, and then implement those. They should also check the implementation of the procedure before finally critiquing the correctness of their solution. And as you might have noticed, those steps are all over the place both along the knowledge dimension as well as along the cognitive dimension (see below).

Revised taxonomy of educational objectives: Instruction for “apply conceptual knowledge”

Now thinking of assessment. Do you really only want to test whether students are able to come to the correct solution when you ask them to apply conceptual knowledge, or would you rather see how well they do along the way and test all the different categories? This is, of course, up to you, and either choice has its advantages. But it is definitely worth thinking about it.

The book gives a lot of examples of assessment for all the six categories along the cognitive process dimension, broken down to match all the sub-categories along that dimension. It’s really worth looking into that, if only for inspiration!

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Bloom, B., Englehart, M. Furst, E., Hill, W., & Krathwohl, D. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. Handbook I: Cognitive domain. New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green.

Anderson, L. &  Krathwohl, D. (Eds) (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing. A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives Pearson Education

I am currently reading the Anderson & Krathwohl (2001) revised taxonomy of learning outcomes. They modified some of the higher levels of the original Bloom (1956) taxonomy and now use a continuum of cognitive processes from “remember” to “create”. They also introduced a second dimension of types of knowledge, ranging from concrete to abstract. While they break those two dimensions down into discrete categories for discussion, they point out that the categories lie along a continuum, similar to how colors lie on a continuum of wave lengths of light.

Revised taxonomy of educational objectives

I have recently worked a bit on how using taxonomies of learning outcomes can help me give advice to university teachers, and reading the book was really helpful, because they break down the categories and give examples how learning objectives in each of the categories can be assessed.

For example the most basic category, “remember”, can consist of either recognizing or recalling, which would be assessed in different ways. Whether students recognize something can be tested by asking verification questions: “Is it true or false that …?”. Students could also be asked to match corresponding items on two lists or to find a best choice in a multiple choice scenario. Recalling, however, might be assessed by giving a prompt and asking students to complete: “A freak wave is a wave with a wave height that ___”.

If you are interested in learning more about how learning outcomes can help you in planning your teaching, check out this awesome resource and stay tuned – I will be back with more!

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Bloom, B., Englehart, M. Furst, E., Hill, W., & Krathwohl, D. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. Handbook I: Cognitive domain. New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green.

Anderson, L. &  Krathwohl, D. (Eds) (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing. A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives Pearson Education

I’ve talked about Bloom’s taxonomy of learning objectives before but I have to admit that I’ve only gone back and read the original Bloom (1956) book and the revised taxonomy by Anderson & Krathwohl (2001) very recently. And it has been so worth it!

I’ve spent the better part of last year coaxing people at work into writing learning objectives, and there has been a lot of opposition to doing so, mainly because people didn’t see the point of writing down learning objectives when they could just write down the content of their courses instead. But what we need to remember is that everybody does have learning objectives, even though they might not have formulated them explicitly.

In the Anderson & Krathwohl (2001) book there is a quote that I like:

Objectives are especially important in teaching because teaching is an intentional and reasoned act.

Nothing too surprising here, but when you think about it it is really beautiful, and a lesson that many of my colleagues should take to heart.

Of course teaching is reasoned: We teach what we believe is important for our students to learn. What we judge as important to learn might depend on many different factors like it is closely related to our own speciality, or our own speciality builds on it, or a group of experts we trust decided it is important, or it has been on the curriculum forever and we feel like it stood the test of time; but in the end all we teach has been judged important enough by us.

But then how we teach is also intentional. We provide materials and activities, help students gain experiences, create a learning environment. No matter how much or how little thought is put into creating the learning environment: In the end we all do our best to create an environment that is conductive to learning. Now what we deem important is highly subjective. Some people think that a lecture theatre with blackboards and a frontal lecture is the best environment, others like studio learning on projects in small groups better. But I think it is super important for educational developers to recognize that no matter whether they agree that the learning environments they encounter at work are the best possible ones, they are still (for the most part) intentional. Of course there is usually room for improvement, but I find it really dangerous to assume that people we work with are not intentional in how they approach teaching, and that they might not have very good reasons for doing exactly what they are doing.

So I guess what I am trying to say is this: Please, dear colleagues (and you know who you are!), instead of going on and on about how they are using instructional strategies that you don’t like, give the teaching staff you are working with the benefit of the doubt, and try to support them in a way they would actually like to be supported. And believe it or not: they might even be happy for you to work with them! :-)

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Bloom, B., Englehart, M. Furst, E., Hill, W., & Krathwohl, D. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. Handbook I: Cognitive domain. New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green.

Anderson, L. &  Krathwohl, D. (Eds) (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing. A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives Pearson Education