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    How To Use Bloom’s Taxonomy to Improve Your Students’ Performance

    Bloom’s taxonomy is a widely used strategic roadmap to help teachers constructively engage students. It provides a way forward for teachers to deliver impactful and goal-aligned education. It empowers teachers to improve students’ information acquisition, retention, and application.  

    Understanding its fundamental approach is the most crucial aspect of knowing more about Bloom’s taxonomy.

    The Fundamentals of Bloom’s Taxonomy

    Smart boy solving a math problem bloom's taxonomy

    You can use Bloom’s taxonomy to improve your class performance by understanding its core approach, adopting its elements, and exploring new ways of teaching using its methods. You can also create a hybrid teaching methodology using Bloom’s taxonomy and adapt it to any class Pre-K and above.

    Bloom’s taxonomy breaks down knowledge acquisition in students through 6 key stages. These stages are as follows –

    1. Knowing & Remembering

    At the basic stage of education, you need to know whether your students can recall information. This can be tested for all levels of education, right from counting & numbers to facts about physics and global history.

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    2. Comprehension & Understanding

    This is a critical stage where students remember the information given to them, but they can also understand it fully and comprehend the core matter. E.g., students can not only remember past and future tense but also recognize them in paragraphs and stories.

    3. Knowledge & Application

    The application stage is where your students can start to use the information gathered and leverage it for real-world applications. You can get a sense of their application skills with standardized tests, math problems, science quizzes, etc.

    4. Analysis of Information

    In this stage, you can empower your students to analyze why certain principles, theorems, rules, and strategies. You can get them thinking with multidimensional questions that ask students to apply more than one level of theorems.

    5. Synthesis of Skills

    To strengthen the knowledge imparted to students, you can opt for synthesis-based questions and approaches. You can start to put different conceptual parts together to make students understand the larger picture of certain math equations, ELA rules, scientific principles, etc.

    6. Evaluation Level

    The evaluation stage’s final level helps students determine which approach to take when thinking about concepts, questions, and quizzes. Your students should be able to form their way ahead and their own opinion during the evaluation stage. This helps them establish ownership over concepts, making them more intuitive.

    You can leverage different elements of Bloom’s taxonomy to ensure that you provide rich and rewarding educational experiences to your students. Educators can transform how they approach their lesson plan when designing curricula by looking at high-level objectives first.

    Instead of limiting yourself to knowledge application through tests, you can focus on role-playing, group projects, and activities that empower students to make evaluation-level decisions. This can help reinforce some of the information they share, especially if they’re starting a new subject, topic, or lesson element.

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    Where did the term Bloom’s taxonomy come from?

    Teacher discussing her lesson about geography bloom's taxonomy

    Bloom’s taxonomy originated in the 1950s by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom. It allowed teachers to determine the right learning objectives in their teaching methodology by accounting for goals, curricula, assessments, and tests. Bloom’s taxonomy has also been iterated upon and updated to create more unique use-cases and modernized approaches.

    From an objective learning point of view, Bloom’s taxonomy can also be categorized as remember, understand, application, analysis, evaluation, and creation. You can also identify various factual, conceptual, and meta-cognitive types of knowledge to make Bloom’s taxonomy unique to your class and approach.

    How teachers are using Bloom’s taxonomy today

    Children sitting on white chairs bloom's taxonomy

    Teachers use Bloom’s taxonomy as a guide, philosophical approach, and objective designing tool. By going beyond standardized testing and question-based homework, teachers use different ways to teach complex topics to kids of all ages. They are exploring the applications of technology and discovering how online learning games can unlock executive-level and evaluative thinking in students of all backgrounds.

    1. Focusing on the three key domains of growth

    You can use Bloom’s taxonomy to optimize all three domains of educational growth, namely cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. By establishing the right set of objectives, you can impact your students’ development across all three pillars. First, you can focus on the cognitive domain, which tests student performance through quizzes, worksheets, and games.

    The affective domain focuses on the level of enthusiasm, natural love for the topic, and inherent motivation for learning. You can ensure that your students are eager to learn something new so that your insights can be absorbed the right way by all students. The psychomotor domain focuses on how the information shared can be manifested through motor movement.

    2. Organizing curricula and lesson plans strategically

    With different types of students responding uniquely to other teaching mediums, an educator can optimize their curriculum through Bloom’s taxonomy. By thoroughly reviewing and analyzing your lesson plan, you can include more resources, games, activities, and events that maximize all levels of learning.

    You can encourage students to make short films for optimizing creation and evaluation level thinking. You can play detective-clue-based games to maximize the analytical and application domains. You can also use group discussions, debates, and oral activities to activate the psychomotor aspect of learning to build student confidence.

    3. Optimizing learning assessments

    Teachers may often use the lower two levels of Bloom’s taxonomy when designing assessments for learning. Quizzes, tests, and exams may only focus on information recall and using theorems correctly. You can transform how you assess your students by designing more complex questions.

    You can invoke more comprehensive and analytical thinking regarding the subject matter. Instead of asking your class to fill in the blanks with the correct verb, you can ask your students to write short stories with the right use of tenses, verbs, uppercase/lowercase, adjectives, sight words, etc.

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    Frequently Asked Questions

    What are the three domains of Bloom's taxonomy?

    Bloom’s taxonomy is designed to impact three significant learning and understanding parts: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor learning. When you leverage it strategically for your program, it can better help students understand complex ideas, subjects, and topics.

    What is a Bloom taxonomy example?

    A key example of Bloom’s taxonomy for younger children can be demonstrated with simple statements:

    • Knowledge – I am a person. That is an object.
    • Comprehension – I am different from an object because I can walk by myself.
    • Application – I can pick up the object in my hands.

    How is Bloom's taxonomy used in class?

    You can use Bloom’s style questions, introduce new lesson plans, and develop learning strategies that ensure kids climb the learning pyramid across all subjects. 

    What are the five parts of a lesson plan?

    Teachers can focus on the topic, the objectives (based on Bloom’s taxonomy), the approach, the schedule, and the reinforcement via practice. These five parts can help you structure your teaching plan and make learning more fun and rewarding for your students.

    AUTHOR
    Jill Baker
    Jill Baker has been teaching for 10 years and she loves sharing everything she has learned to help other teachers.

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