Bloom's Taxonomy: Taxonomy of Knowledge

Bloom’s Taxonomy (BT) is taxonomy of knowledge or classification of educational objectives commonly used in educational environment to determine different levels of leaner’s mental competencies also to dig out from lower to higher order thinking levels.  It was developed by Bloom et al. (1956) and later it was revised by Anderson et al. (2001).  It is a combination of three hierarchical models used to classify educational learning objectives.  According to Anderson et al. (2001), these three domains cover the learning objectives in Cognitive (knowledge), Affective (attitudes/feelings) and Psychomotor (doings/skills) respectively.  Hence, these domains are useful to classify educational learning objective from the most basic to the more complex levels of learner’s thinking.

1. Cognitive Domain:

The focus of cognitive theory of learning is on the traditional education and is often used to structure curriculum learning objectives, assessments and activities.   Moreover, it is hierarchy of six levels to judge the lower level and higher order thinking levels of the learner.  These levels are  i). Knowledge ii). Comprehension iii). Application iv). Analysis v). Synthesis and vi). Evaluation (Bloom et al. 1956).  Furthermore, these levels were further explained by Anderson et al (2001) thus, numbers of changes were made.  The revises levels of cognitive domain alongwith question cues and skill demonstrated are as under:   

Levels	Question Cues	Skill Demonstrated
Remembering	Recognizing, listing, describing, retrieving, naming and finding	Recall information
Understanding	Interpreting, summarizing, paraphrasing, classifying and explaining	Explaining ideas or concepts
Applying	Carrying out, implementing, executing and using.	Using information in another familiar situation
Analyzing	Attributing, comparing, deconstructing, integrating, finding, organizing, outlining and structuring	Breaking information into parts to explore understandings & relationship.
Evaluating	Checking, Critiquing, Detecting, Experimenting, Hypothesizing, Judging, Monitoring & Testing	Justifying a decision or course of action
Creating	Constructing, Designing, Devising, Inventing, Making, Planning & Producing	Generating new ideas, products, or ways of viewing things

2. Affective Domain:

]Affective domain is the second domain of Bloom's Taxonomy which focuses to assess the improvement of learner’s attitudes, emotions, behavior and feelings. It is hierarchy of five stages as described by Isaacs (1996) these are i) Receiving, ii) Responding, iii) Valuing, iv) Organization and v) Characterization. The levels of affective domain levels and skill demonstrated are as under: 

Levels	Skill Demonstrated
Receiving	Measure the learner’s memory, recognition and his willingness to notice a particular occasion, phenomenon, event or fact.
Responding	Focus to check leaner’s response, reaction, at first with compliance, later willingly and with satisfaction.
Valuing	Accepts worth of a thing.
Organization	Organizes values; determines interrelationship; adapts behavior to value system
Characterization	Generalizes certain values into controlling tendencies; emphasis on internal consistency; later integrated these into a total philosophy of life or world view and tries to build abstract knowledge.

3. Psychomotor Domain:

The third domain of BT psychomotor, focuses on the learner’s ability of physically doings, activities, actions and skills.  According to (Isaacs, 1996) this domain was not compiled by Blooms and his co-workers but, others have developed their own psychomotor taxonomies.  Furthermore, the six levels of psychomotor domain defined by (Isaacs, 1996) are i) Reflex, ii) Fundamental movement, iii) Perceptual abilities, iv) Physical abilities, v) Skilled movement and vi) on-discursive communication. The levels of psychomotor domain levels and skill demonstrated are as under: 

Levels	Skill Demonstrated
Reflex	Usually the objectives are not set in low level
Fundamental movements	Applicable mostly to young children (Crawl, run, jump, reach, change direction)
Perceptual abilities	Measures the skills of learner like catching, writing, balancing, distinguishing and manipulating.
Physical abilities	Focus on the learner’s physical abilities like stop, increase, move quickly, change and react.
Skilled movements	The skilled movements of learner are assessed like playing, hitting, swimming, diving and using.
Non-discursive communication	Higher level is used for measuring learner’s skills like expressing, creating, miming, designing and interpreting.

In sum, all these domains of Bloom's Taxonomy are used to measure the knowledge, attitudes, and skills of the learner with a varied depth levels in each domain.  These models are useful to grade educational learning objectives from basic to complex levels of the learner’s thinking.  Hence, it is better choice for measuring, assessing and evaluating the knowledge of the learner’s in educational institutions for the assessment purpose.  However, implementation of Bloom's Taxonomy in all three domains exposes to different problems of technological and pedagogy and are therefore too difficult to achieve in initial trials.