Bloom's taxonomy: what is it and what is it for?

Education is the process by which training or learning is provided to one or more people with the purpose that they develop, train and optimize their cognitive, affective, social and morals.

Education is an essential element when it comes to generating a common context and learning different skills. necessary to adapt to the environment and be able to perform different functions, being something that has concerned humanity since the beginning. antiquity.

Despite the fact that access to formal education has not been compulsory and accessible to all until relatively recently, it is have carried out different models or attempts to assess what is intended to be achieved or what learning objectives have formal. One of these models is Bloom's taxonomy., which we are going to talk about throughout this article.

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Bloom's Taxonomy: what is it?

Bloom's taxonomy is a classification of different goals to be achieved through formal education by Benjamin Bloom

based on the three aspects that different education experts had reflected in 1948 when trying to establish a consensus regarding the objectives of education: cognition, affectivity and psychomotricity.

It is a classification of objectives carried out in a hierarchical way, organized based on whether the activity requires more or less complex processing. The author started in his classification from the contributions of behaviorism and cognitivism prevailing at the time.

This taxonomy has been used and valued in the world of education since its inception. In itself, although Bloom's taxonomy starts from the consideration of the three great aspects and these are analyzed and classified, tends to focus especially on the cognitive side, being this taxonomy finalized in 1956. Regarding the classification of objectives and the dimensions worked on in each of the aspects, in the taxonomy we can find the following.

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cognitive taxonomy

The aspect in which perhaps the greatest emphasis has been placed throughout the history of education, and in which Bloom's taxonomy also focuses especially, is in the cognitive sphere.

In her, It is intended to enhance the student's competence in the achievement or achievement of certain cognitive capacities or objectives (specifically six) from different intellectual, affective and psychomotor capacities. Although within each one of them you can find different actions and aspects to work on, as a In summary, we can consider that the main objectives of education according to Bloom's taxonomy are the following.

1. Knowledge

Although the concept of knowledge may seem very broad, in this taxonomy it is indicated as such the ability to remember what was previously acquired in a more or less approximate way. It is considered the most basic of abilities that the student must acquire and the one that requires less processing.

2. Comprehension

Acquiring and keeping recorded what has been learned does not require great processing, but per se it does not help us to adapt to the environment. We need to understand what we have learned. Thus, a second objective is to be able to transform information as it comes to us into something we can come to understand and interpret.

3. Application

A more complex step is the application. At this moment the subject must not only capture and understand what is said to him but also be able to use it. It is not the same to know and understand what a multiplication is than to do it in a practical way and when it is needed.

4. Analysis

The analysis of the information supposes to be able to abstract the knowledge obtained in the previous moments, requiring the ability to fragment the reality of what has been learned in order to distinguish what configures it and allow the application in different scopes.

can reach develop hypotheses and contrast them based on the information provided. Continuing with the multiplication of the previous example, it would be to be able to understand that we can perform a multiplication in a given problem and why it is correct. It requires high processing.

5. Synthesis

Synthesizing means developing a model in a summarized way, combining the information received to create something different from what has been learned (in fact, in later revisions synthesis is changed to creation). It is one of the most complex cognitive objectives, since it involves not only working with the information learned but also incorporate other elements that help us to obtain its base and apply it to create.

6. Assessment

This element mainly supposes the fact of being able to make judgments based on a well-founded opinion or criterion. It can even mean non-acceptance of what is being taughtFor this, a very advanced level of mental elaboration is needed.

Reviewing this educational proposal

Although Bloom's taxonomy has been a benchmark in the world of education since its inception, this does not imply that different authors have not made any changes in this regard. Specifically, the one published in 2001 by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl, who were students of the original author, stands out.

In said change, it was proposed that instead of using nouns to value each of the categories or key objectives, They will use verbs, something that facilitates the understanding that the objective is the fact of doing a certain action and not its result per se. It is emphasized that we are facing an event that requires an active and makes the student the protagonist of his own learning process.

The sequencing of categories was also modified, starting to consider the fact of evaluating higher order thinking. but below the creation process (in the original model the evaluation was considered as more superior to the synthesis/creation).

Likewise, the model has subsequently been extended including different aspects related to the use of new information technologies and communication, assimilating to other models.

Bibliographic references:

• Bloom, B.S. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals: Handbook I, cognitive domain. New York; Toronto: Longmans, Green.