An eLearning Assessment for Remembering Level of Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy

Imagine that you have covered an introduction to Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy (as seen below) and want to assess whether the participants remember which subdomains correspond to which verbs in Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy.  That’s where Gameo can be used to create an interactive eLearning Assessment. Click here for a sample.

Bloom’s Taxonomy

Benjamin Bloom was an educational psychologist who is best known for his 1956 book, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain. The book became the definitive guide for assessment in education because it provided a way to assess a student’s ability to meet educational objectives. It became known as Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Bloom felt that a person’s learning fell into three domains: Affective (emotional), Psychomotor (physical) and Cognitive (thinking). He divided each of these domains into skills levels from lower order to higher order processes where each level was dependent on first achieving the skills from the level below it. The focus of this course is on the Cognitive Domain.

Bloom’s Taxonomy: Cognitive Domain

Skills Level: Description

Knowledge: Recall, or recognition of terms, ideas, procedure, theories, etc.

Comprehension: Translate, interpret, extrapolate, but not see full implications or transfer to other situations, closer to literal translation.

Application: Apply abstractions, general principles, or methods to specific concrete situations.

Analysis: Separation of a complex idea into its constituent parts and an understanding of organization and relationship between the parts. Includes realizing the distinction between hypothesis and fact as well as between relevant and extraneous variables.

Synthesis: Creative, mental construction of ideas and concepts from multiple sources to form complex ideas into a new, integrated, and meaningful pattern subject to given constraints.

Evaluation: To make a judgment of ideas or methods using external evidence or self-selected criteria substantiated by observations or informed rationalizations.

From: Bloom, B. S.; Engelhart, M. D.; Furst, E. J.; Hill, W. H.; Krathwohl, D. R. (1956).

Bloom’s Taxonomy in the Digital Age

Despite quickly becoming the definitive reference tool for educators and trainers, Bloom’s Taxonomy was not without criticism. Some debated the ordering of the hierarchy, suggesting Evaluating comes before Analyzing. As the decades went on, others questioned if it was still relevant and updates were proposed.  With the increase in digital technologies and the advent of eLearning, the most recent revision has been offered by Andrew Churches, who updated the taxonomy in 2007 to reflect these fundamental shifts in the learning environment. He called it Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy.

Adapted from: Churches, A. 2007