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A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Complete Edition

Lorin W. Anderson,

David R. Krathwohl

4.04 · Rating details · 219 ratings · 15 reviews

Drawing heavily from Bloom's Taxonomy, this new book helps teachers understand and implement a standards-based curriculum. An extraordinary group of cognitive psychologists, curriculum specialists, teacher-educators, and researchers have developed a two-dimensional framework, focusing on knowledge and cognitive processes, that defines what students are expected to learn in ...more

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Hardcover, 352 pages

Published December 19th 2000 by Pearson (first published December 2000)

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Jul 25, 2019 Diz rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: critical-thinking, education

This book is a must-read for teachers of any subject. It really makes you think about the connections between course objectives, classroom activities, and assessments. I'll be utilizing a lot of ideas from this book when I plan new courses and when I revise the ones I already have. ...more

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Mar 08, 2014 Rob rated it really liked it · review of another edition

The original taxonomy was created by educational evaluators (the people who write tests for college courses). It was geared toward helping them share different type of test questions. I find it does not work as well for creating training.

This taxonomy makes a lot more sense than the original one. I like that this one doesn't assume you're incapable of operating at a higher level in the taxonomy without completing the lower level. I also like that it goes into much more detail about how to use it The original taxonomy was created by educational evaluators (the people who write tests for college courses). It was geared toward helping them share different type of test questions. I find it does not work as well for creating training.

This taxonomy makes a lot more sense than the original one. I like that this one doesn't assume you're incapable of operating at a higher level in the taxonomy without completing the lower level. I also like that it goes into much more detail about how to use it for learning and teaching.

It also focuses on a new purpose for the taxonomy--identifying whether the objectives, teaching activities, and assessments all align with one another--that's helpful when you're reviewing a course. However, it only goes so far as to identify whether the same cognitive processes are used--in your objectives, teaching, and assessments. For example, if your objective is to have students learn to write a paper about how political science principles play out in history, but your lesson asks students to design a bicycle, the method in this book would say they align because they use the same cognitive processes.

The taxonomy also adds a new dimension--a knowledge dimension (making the taxonomy a matrix). At any level of cognitive process in the taxonomy (remember, understand, apply, etc.), there four knowledge dimensions: factual, conceptual (concepts, principles, and frameworks or mental models), procedural (algorithms and heuristics), and metacognitive. I like that this help clarify that something can be factual but still be understanding, or can be conceptual but only at the remember level, etc. However, it does become a little awkward because most objectives at a particular cognitive level tend to apply to just one level. For example, even though you can draw on facts and concepts when you're applying something, most application-level objectives tend to focus on procedural knowledge. Similarly, most understanding-level objectives tend to focus on conceptual knowledge.

Also, the specific knowledge areas can be a bit confusing at first. "Conceptual" includes not only concepts, but also principles and mental models. "Procedural" includes both procedures and the heuristic portion of problem solving (mental models are already covered as part of "conceptual"). This means that there's no way to look at the placement of an objective in the taxonomy table and tell whether it addresses problem solving or not.

The taxonomy also completely revamped the sub-categories of the cognitive area. I found the restructuring here to be very thoughtfully done. The original sub-categories were not especially useful for creating training--as witnessed by the fact that most people didn't even know they existed. I'd never even heard of them until I made the effort to actually locate and read the original taxonomy (the 200-page book, not the basic six-category summaries you see floating around). In the new taxonomy, each sub-category is a slightly different cognitive process, and therefore requires a different instructional method (for example, the two sub-categories in "remember" are "recognize" and "recall"). If one were to expand the taxonomy table so that each cell represented a sub-category of cognitive process and knowledge type, it could become a effective task analysis tool to identify the types of skills required by different activities. You could then use these to craft objectives, teaching activities, and assessments that should (in theory) all align. Of course the caveat stated above--where papers on political science and designing bicycles might look the same--applies here too. ...more

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Nov 29, 2012 Adrian Buck rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: lang-ed

A necesssary introduction to joined-up teaching, this book has filled a gap in my own professional education. The gap between lesson planning, which I studied for my CELTA ,and syllabus planning, which I studied for my MEd. This book focuses on planning course units spread over 5-25 lessons. Its quite shocking that you can get as far as I have in teacher education without tackling course units, or hearing about Bloom's Taxonomy .

This revision of Bloom's work is quite radical, re-presenting it as A necesssary introduction to joined-up teaching, this book has filled a gap in my own professional education. The gap between lesson planning, which I studied for my CELTA ,and syllabus planning, which I studied for my MEd. This book focuses on planning course units spread over 5-25 lessons. Its quite shocking that you can get as far as I have in teacher education without tackling course units, or hearing about Bloom's Taxonomy .

This revision of Bloom's work is quite radical, re-presenting it as a two-dimensional framework applied not only to educational objectives, but also to instructional activities and assessment practices. The goal behind this is alignment: that we assess what we have taught, and what we have taught is what we set out to teach in the first place.

The framework consists of a knowledge dimension (factual, conceptual, procedural and metacognitive) and a cognitive process dimension (remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate and create). Despite the assertion that the framework has been based on the latest cognitive science, there is little in-text referencing to that science cf Why don't Students like school. More convincing is the claim that Bloom's original definitions of have been modified to reflect teachers' actual usage of such terms. In fact the whole book reads more as an attempt to systemitise the way teachers talk about what they do: and the analysis is linguistic rather than cognitive. In fact reflecting on both Anderson's and Willingham's work, I am sadly reminded how far away we still are from a pedagogy based on cognitive or neurological science.

The reversion to the way teachers actually talk about what they do seems retrograde, the enshrinement of folk psychology in educational terminology. I know that from a philosopical persepctive there are difficulties subordinating factual under conceptual knowledge. Factual knowledge is a instance of conceptual knowledge, if I meaningfully say "Mt Etna is a volcano" I have to know what a 'volcano' is. What I don't know is whether it is educationally useful to get a child to remember that 'Mt Etna is a volcano' before or after he understands what a volcano is. This book, despite offering 'hierarchies' of knowledge and cognitive process doesn't seem to answer that question, saying instead that teachers do teach factual before conceptual knowledge. The 'Addition Facts Vignette' most broadly illustrates my reservations, as it seems mostly about teaching the conceptual relations between numbers rather than a series of addition facts, which seem to be the result of the child repeatedly grasping the addition concepts.

I look forward to the time when teaching is built on scientific foundations in the way that medicine or engineering is, in the meantime teachers will have to rely on the traditions and personal insights that we have always relied on. This book has a well deserved place in that tradition. ...more

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Jan 30, 2010 Jeff rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: education

This revision of Bloom's functions as a useful tool for helping educators articulate what outcomes that we want for our students in all of their complexity. The authors have taken the original taxonomy and expanded it to include a new dimension of knowledge that works in concert with a revised vision of the cognitive processes of the original. This text articulates the changes and explicitly defines the terms of each dimension. While not the most captivating of reads, educators should engage in ...more

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Jan 22, 2009 Andy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This follow up to Bloom's Taxonomy is an excellent update. It's practical and upfront. More of us in the teaching profession should think about our lessons at this depth (but we don't).

I have read and re-read sections, recreated the graph into pyramids and bulls-eye target graphics, and then I come back to the plain rows and columns because they are so much more useful.

I can't seem to convince fellow teachers to read the book. A lot of folks nod their heads and go about their business. ...more

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Nov 12, 2012 Viviana Lloncon paillalafquen rated it liked it · review of another edition

Is a great book!

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Jan 16, 2014 Sara rated it liked it · review of another edition

Heavy. Reads like a textbook.

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Jan 24, 2008 cassie rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Recommends it for: teachers, instructional designers

Good information, but very very dry.

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Sep 13, 2019 Ryan Patrick rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: education, non-fiction-2019

It is definitely valuable to be able to think about class objectives and make sure your assessments are actually measuring what you aimed to teach. For putting all this into practice, however, I still prefer Charting Your Course: How to Prepare to Teach More Effectively (based on the original taxonomy, not this revised one). ...more

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Aug 09, 2019 Danika at The Lesbrary rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-lesbian

I had heard about Bloom's Taxonomy in the general sense, so I wanted to get a little more background on it. I do think this taxonomy is helpful, and I like the updates. I was hoping for a little more in the way of specific suggestions on how to best teach/assess each cell, though, and there wasn't much of that. I realized skimming through the appendices that the original book devoted a lot of space to assessment examples, so I'll have to pick that one up. ...more

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Apr 20, 2011 Kandrea Cheney rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: noone

Recommended to Kandrea Cheney by: My boss

Shelves: non-fiction, self-help

YUCK! While it's a great concept and I like the Taxonomy Table with the different knowledges and such, it was so hard to read and I didn't understand half of what I read. While I want to continue improving my teaching skills and techniques, I want to read books that I can grasp and actually come away learning something. ...more

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Nov 13, 2016 Cassandra rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-liked-it

Many educators cite Bloom's regularly. I find this revision to be more accessible than the first, though the first had a little more information on where each process came from. ...more

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