Benjamin Bloom: biography of this psychologist and researcher

Benjamin Bloom was an American psychologist and educator who made important contributions to the field of mastery learning and the taxonomy of educational goals.

His work has influenced multiple pedagogical fields in the second half of the 21st century, as well as allowing a clearer understanding of children's cognitive development.

Let's see the life of this psychologist throughout a short biography of benjamin bloom, in which we will know what his work was and his theory of the taxonomy of educational objectives.

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Biography of Benjamin Bloom

This is a summary of the life of Benjamin Bloom, including his life and professional trajectory.

childhood and youth

Benjamin Samuel Bloom was born in Lansford, Pennsylvania, USA. on February 21, 1913. He was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, who were fleeing the discrimination that existed in the country towards this group at the beginning of the century.

From a young age he showed his great curiosity for the world and knowledge. From his early years he showed himself to be an insatiable reader, and if he was given the opportunity to investigate something he had read in a book, he did not hesitate to do so.

She was good at learning what he had read. He also stood out for his reading ability and comprehension, reaching the point that in the library where he borrowed books, They wouldn't let him return them the same day he picked them up, since they didn't think he was capable of reading an entire book in less than a minute. day.

Professional life

Benjamin Bloom received his undergraduate degree from the Pennsylvania State University in 1935 and subsequently he received his doctorate in education in 1942 from the University of Chicago. He was admitted as a member of the Examination Board of the University of Chicago, serving in this position until 1943. After this, he became examiner at the university until 1959.

He traveled the world and came to work as an educational advisor to governments of countries that were in the process of developing and establishing democratic regimes, such as Israel and India.

Benjamin Bloom saw education as a process that required effort in order to achieve academic achievement, but that this goes beyond the purely school. Education was the way that, as long as it was carried out in the most appropriate way, allowed the full human potential of the students to be extracted. Education had to acquire an optimistic vision of the student body, seeing them as people who, if they set their minds to it, could achieve their dreams.

Bloom's very human vision towards education was a true source of inspiration for other educational psychologists, educators and philosophers of education, in addition to those who had the opportunity to become his students.

Benjamin Bloom passed away in Chicago, Illinois, USA. on September 13, 1999, at age 86.

Contributions as a researcher

Bloom exerted a profound influence on the field of educational psychology. His main contributions in this discipline were his ideas on mastery learning, child cognitive development, and his famous taxonomy of educational objectives.

His work focused on research in the study of education from a perspective psychological, specifically in relation to the cognitive, emotional and psychomotor aspects of learning.

Cognitive aspects refer to the ability of students to handle in a useful way and giving meaning to the information learned in the classroom. The emotional ones would be related to the feelings and attitudes that are generated as a result of the educational process. Finally, the psychomotor aspects are everything in which the skills are involved. physical, such as the manipulation of objects or the exercise of the body, to acquire the new knowledge.

In 1956 he published his main work, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain, in which he exposed his new educational model. This taxonomy was developed to help teachers in their teaching task, especially to delimit which are the pedagogical objectives to be achieved in the classroom.

The main idea of ​​this taxonomy is that not all educational objectives should be treated and prioritized in the same way. For example, memorizing historical dates, important as it is, is not the same as analyzing the historical facts that behind them, the political depth of the events that occurred and how they have shaped society to this day.

Taxonomy of educational objectives

This is a classification of different objectives that educators should propose to students. Benjamin Bloom divided these goals into three domains:

1. Affective

It is the domain of how people emotionally react to educational content. Within this domain there are five levels: reception, response, assessment, organization and characterize.

2. Psychomotor

Relates to the abilities to physically manipulate objects, as are tools.

Although Bloom and his colleagues did not really give levels to this domain, several educational psychologists have given it sublevels. Some of them are: reflexes, fundamental movements, perception, physical abilities, expert movements and non-verbal communication.

3. Cognitive

This domain refers to acquired knowledge in its most literal form, in addition to understanding new information and critical thinking skills.

Traditionally, education has tried to strengthen the skills that are within this domain, especially the rote learning of what is explained in class.

In the taxonomy of educational objectives, this domain is subdivided into 6 levels, which go from the lowest to the highest level: knowledge, understanding, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation.

Some of Bloom's detractors do agree with him on these categories that make up the cognitive domain, but they do not consider that this is the real hierarchy, changing the order or considering that most of these levels are really subcomponents that acquire the same importance in the development process. learning.

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Benjamin Bloom Legacy

This psychologist has come to be considered a guru in the field of educational psychology. Besides, he was a prominent educational activist. He took an important role in founding the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA).

When he was in the education department at the University of Chicago, he developed the MESA (Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistical Analysis) program with the aim of preparing schoolchildren who presented very striking critical thinking abilities a type of specialized education, in order to make the most of their potential.