TEACHING & Bloom’s Taxonomy Explained … What Does It Mean for Teaching & Researching?

by Bob Whitesel Ph.D., 5/18/15.

Today I was mentoring an adjunct faculty member.  He has a wide-breadth of knowledge and will do a fine job teaching for us. But, we began to talk about the difference between undergraduate education and graduate education.

Graduate education differs to a degree with undergraduate education in that graduate education tries to foster thinking and application that is “higher” on Bloom’s taxonomy of learning domains.  Benjamin S. Bloom led a team of educators that devised a hierarchal way of looking at education about the time I entered college. His book is a classic, but regrettably seldom read: Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals (1969).

Though often simplified and misunderstood, Bloom’s taxonomy is still helpful for the adjunct or occasional instructor to gain a general grasp of the hierarchal structure of the different objectives that instructors must set for students.

So, for the adjunct professor wanting a quick overview, attached is a helpful chart from http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2012/07/a-quick-guide-to-21st-century-critical.html

 

Also, below is a comparative figure developed by Andrew Churches and published by GlobalDigitalCitizen.org describing the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. Download the poster here: FIGURE Blooms Taxonomy poster GlobalDigitalCitizen

You can also download a helpful explanation of Bloom’s Taxonomy from BloomsTaxonomy.org here: http://www.bloomstaxonomy.org/Blooms%20Taxonomy%20questions.pdf

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