Bloom’s Taxonomy

by Patricia Armstrong, former Assistant Director, Center for Teaching

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Background Information
In 1956, Benjamin Bloom with collaborators Max Englehart, Edward Furst, Walter Hill, and David Krathwohl 
published a framework for categorizing educational goals: Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Familiarly known 
as Bloom’s Taxonomy, this framework has been applied by generations of K­12 teachers and college instructors in 
their teaching.

The framework elaborated by Bloom and his collaborators consisted of six major categories: Knowledge, 
Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. The categories after Knowledge were presented 
as “skills and abilities,” with the understanding that knowledge was the necessary precondition for putting these 
skills and abilities into practice.

While each category contained subcategories, all lying along a continuum from simple to complex and concrete to 
abstract, the taxonomy is popularly remembered according to the six main categories.

The Original Taxonomy (1956)
Here are the authors’ brief explanations of these main categories in from the appendix of Taxonomy of Educational 
Objectives (Handbook One, pp. 201­207):

Knowledge “involves the recall of specifics and universals, the recall of methods and processes, or the recall of a 
pattern, structure, or setting.”

Comprehension “refers to a type of understanding or apprehension such that the individual knows what is being 
communicated and can make use of the material or idea being communicated without necessarily relating it to other 
material or seeing its fullest implications.”

Application refers to the “use of abstractions in particular and concrete situations.”
Analysis represents the “breakdown of a communication into its constituent elements or parts such that the relative 
hierarchy of ideas is made clear and/or the relations between ideas expressed are made explicit.”

Synthesis involves the “putting together of elements and parts so as to form a whole.”

Evaluation engenders “judgments about the value of material and methods for given purposes.”

The 1984 edition of Handbook One is available in the CFT Library in Calhoun 116. See itsACORN record for call 
number and availability.

While many explanations of Bloom’s Taxonomy and examples of its applications are readily available on the 
Internet, this guide to Bloom’s Taxonomy is particularly useful because it contains links to dozens of other web 
sites.

Barbara Gross Davis, in the “Asking Questions” chapter of Tools for Teaching, also provides examples of questions 
corresponding to the six categories. This chapter is not available in the online version of the book, but Tools for 
Teaching is available in the CFT Library. See itsACORN record for call number and availability.

The Revised Taxonomy (2001)
A group of cognitive psychologists, curriculum theorists and instructional researchers, and testing and assessment 
specialists published in 2001 a revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy with the title A Taxonomy for Teaching, Learning, 
and Assessment. This title draws attention away from the somewhat static notion of “educational objectives” (in 
Bloom’s original title) and points to a more dynamic conception of classification.

The authors of the revised taxonomy underscore this dynamism, using verbs and gerunds to label their categories 
and subcategories (rather than the nouns of the original taxonomy). These “action words” describe the cognitive 
processes by which thinkers encounter and work with knowledge:

Remember 

Recognizing

Recalling

Understand 

Interpreting

Exemplifying
Classifying

Summarizing

Inferring

Comparing

Explaining

Apply 

Executing

Implementing

Analyze 

Differentiating

Organizing

Attributing

Evaluate 

Checking

Critiquing

Create 

Generating

Planning

Producing

In the revised taxonomy, knowledge is at the basis of these six cognitive processes, but its authors created a separate
taxonomy of the types of knowledge used in cognition:

Factual Knowledge 
Knowledge of terminology

Knowledge of specific details and elements

Conceptual Knowledge 

Knowledge of classifications and categories

Knowledge of principles and generalizations

Knowledge of theories, models, and structures

Procedural Knowledge 

Knowledge of subject­specific skills and algorithms

Knowledge of subject­specific techniques and methods

Knowledge of criteria for determining when to use appropriate procedures

Metacognitive Knowledge 

Strategic Knowledge

Knowledge about cognitive tasks, including appropriate contextual and conditional knowledge

Self­knowledge

Mary Forehand from the University of Georgia provides a guide to the revised version giving a brief summary of the
revised taxonomy and a helpful table of the six cognitive processes and four types of knowledge.

Why Use Bloom’s Taxonomy?
The authors of the revised taxonomy suggest a multi­layered answer to this question, to which the author of this 
teaching guide has added some clarifying points:

Objectives (learning goals) are important to establish in a pedagogical interchange so that teachers and students alike
understand the purpose of that interchange.

Teachers can benefit from using frameworks to organize objectives because

Organizing objectives helps to clarify objectives for themselves and for students.
Having an organized set of objectives helps teachers to: 

“plan and deliver appropriate instruction”;

“design valid assessment tasks and strategies”;and

“ensure that instruction and assessment are aligned with the objectives.”

Citations are from A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of 
Educational Objectives.

Further Information
Section III of A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational 
Objectives, entitled “The Taxonomy in Use,” provides over 150 pages of examples of applications of the taxonomy. 
Although these examples are from the K­12 setting, they are easily adaptable to the university setting.

Section IV, “The Taxonomy in Perspective,” provides information about 19 alternative frameworks to Bloom’s 
Taxonomy, and discusses the relationship of these alternative frameworks to the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy.
 The 4Cs of 21st Century Skills
What are the 21st Century skills needed inside the classroom?

Want to learn the 4 Cs for 21st Century skills in the classroom? Thanks to Twitter, I found them. I watch
social media closely and it's my job to share some of the hot topics on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and
other outlets that teachers, principals, students, and parents are contributing.
Mr. Zac Leonard posted an infographic on his Twitter account explaining the 4Cs for 21st Century skills in
the classroom. The 4Cs listed are communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. All four
of these items are essential inside the 21st Century classroom. These could be the 4Cs for any century
classroom as all of these skills are timeless and highly valued not only inside the classroom, but in all
professions.

21st century skills

Communication is about sharing thoughts, questions, ideas, and solutions. In the technological age, it's
much easier and, at the same time, harder to communicate. Technology has provided us with more
convenient ways to communicate, but sometimes the various ways can become overwhelming. In
addition, the communication can become more about the tech being used than the message you're
trying to send. Without effective communication, there's no way to get anything done inside the
classroom or anywhere, which is why this is an essential 21st Century skill.

Collaboration is about working together to reach a goal and putting talent, expertise, and smarts to
work. Just like with communication, technology has made collaboration easier. Actually, technology takes
collaboration a step farther, making types of collaboration possible that weren't before technology. Just
like with communication though, the same breakdowns can happen. The number of choices can get
overwhelming, and the actual collaboration can get lost while we pay too much attention to the tool
we're using to collaborate. As the world goes more interconnected, collaboration will become a more
and more essential skill than it already is, which is why it makes the list of the 4Cs for 21st Century skills.

Critical thinking is looking at problems in a new way and linking learning across subjects and disciplines.
Just like with the previous two ideas, critical thinking has been an essential skill in every century and
profession. However, technology has changed the critical thinking platform. The more technology makes
menial tasks such as memorization null and void, the more room that gives us to spend time on more
complex thinking skills. However, it's too easy to let technology do the thinking for us, or thinking that it
does. In order to succeed in the 21st Century, you have to remember that, no matter how high tech the
machine, it's useless without a person telling it what to do and thinking critically about the result.

Creativity is trying new approaches to get things done, innovation, and invention. The 21st Century is a
fun time to be creative thanks to technology. Not only are the traditional ways of creativity still available,
but there are tons of new possibilities made available. Instead of just painting a picture, you can animate
it or arrange a piece of music on a computer without ever learning how to play an instrument. All that
said, it's still up to you to put things through the creative process. Whether you're going to tell the
world's next bestselling story or you are just trying to find a way to organize your classroom more
efficiently, it's up to you to utilize both your own thinking power and the technology at hand to get the
creative project done.

Do you agree with these 4 Cs? Which ones would you add? What do you think the future 4 Cs will be?