Bloom's Taxonomy
Doug Peterson,
doug – off the record,
May 17, 2010
Nice representation of Bloom's Taxonomy, an old standby in educational theory:
"Over the years, people have tried to explain learning theory in a number of ways but we keep returning to the original or slightly modified theories based upon Bloom's work," says Doug Peterson.
This makes sense to me. I recall recently, after saying that the expert 'recognizes' students achievement, being asked what I look for when I recognize someone. I started to answer and the questioner says, "well, you're just repeating Bloom's, aren't you?" And of course I was. Because pretty much as soon as you try to articulate how you recognize something, you are reduced to words and (especially) verbs, which is what Bloom's boils down to. That's why it never fails, when people are asked to describe learning. It's a taxonomy of verbs. What else would you use?
But it seems to me that the structure of Bloom's fools us into believing that the structure of language in some way reflects the structure of learning. That some types of actions have this type of learning result, and other types of action have that type of learning result. But this doesn't seem right to me. So am I going to come up with some other metric to describe learning? No - that's the trap - using a metric to describe learning.
"Over the years, people have tried to explain learning theory in a number of ways but we keep returning to the original or slightly modified theories based upon Bloom's work," says Doug Peterson.
This makes sense to me. I recall recently, after saying that the expert 'recognizes' students achievement, being asked what I look for when I recognize someone. I started to answer and the questioner says, "well, you're just repeating Bloom's, aren't you?" And of course I was. Because pretty much as soon as you try to articulate how you recognize something, you are reduced to words and (especially) verbs, which is what Bloom's boils down to. That's why it never fails, when people are asked to describe learning. It's a taxonomy of verbs. What else would you use?
But it seems to me that the structure of Bloom's fools us into believing that the structure of language in some way reflects the structure of learning. That some types of actions have this type of learning result, and other types of action have that type of learning result. But this doesn't seem right to me. So am I going to come up with some other metric to describe learning? No - that's the trap - using a metric to describe learning.
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