Bloom's Taxonomy: From a 1948 Boston Meeting to Remember, Apply, Create

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Bloom's taxonomy grew out of an informal meeting of college examiners at the American Psychological Association convention in Boston in 1948. They lacked a shared language for what tests actually measured, so a committee chaired by Benjamin Bloom built a framework, publishing the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives handbook in 1956. Its cognitive domain ranked knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. A 2001 revision turned these nouns into verbs, remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate and create, and placed create at the top. The hosts illustrate each level with a cook moving from recalling a bread recipe to inventing a signature dish.

A second volume in 1964 covered the affective domain of attitudes and emotions, moving from receiving through responding, valuing and organizing to characterizing. Bloom's team left the psychomotor domain without subcategories until Elizabeth Simpson built a seven-level scheme in 1972. The model has drawn criticism: philosopher Richard W. Morshead faulted the original in 1965 for lacking a systematic rationale, the hierarchy invites disdain for lower-level skills, and problem-based learning can skip steps. Defenders point to instructional scaffolding, and educators use the taxonomy to focus on how content is processed.

• The hosts call receiving an emotional gatekeeper: a resentful learner in a mandatory seminar may hear without learning.
• Organizing means resolving the clash between a new value and an existing mental schema.
• Simpson's levels run from perception and set through guided response, mechanism and complex overt response to adaptation and origination.
• Field identification of plant and animal species sits at the lowest level yet demands extreme pattern recognition.
• A 2020 study found institutions did not agree on which action verbs belong to which level.