Bloom's taxonomy, explained for teachers

Bloom's taxonomy is a classification of learning objectives by the kind of thinking they ask for. Its main use for a teacher is as a check on your own questions and tasks: are they all asking students to recall something, or are some asking them to use it, compare it, or judge it?

Where it comes from

The original, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Cognitive Domain, was published in 1956 by a committee of examiners led by Benjamin Bloom. Its six categories, from simplest to most complex, were knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The committee wanted a shared vocabulary so that people writing tests at different universities could compare what they were measuring.

In 2001, Lorin Anderson, David Krathwohl and colleagues published a revision. It changed the categories to verbs and swapped the order of the top two: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create. It also added a second dimension that separates what kind of knowledge is involved: factual, conceptual, procedural, or metacognitive. Both versions are in use, and teachers often mix the names.

A classroom example

A teacher is covering the water cycle with sixth graders. The same topic can produce questions at every level.

• Remember: Name the process by which liquid water becomes vapor.
• Understand: Explain in your own words why clouds form as air rises.
• Apply: A puddle disappears on a warm, windy day. Which parts of the cycle caused that?
• Analyze: Compare how the cycle works over an ocean and over a desert.
• Evaluate: A classmate says rain is just water falling out of the sky and has nothing to do with evaporation. Judge the claim and give reasons.
• Create: Design a model that shows the cycle using materials from the classroom.

Common misuse

• Treating it as a ladder you must climb in order. The pyramid picture is not in the original, and the categories overlap. Students use recall inside analysis all the time.
• Judging a question by its verb. "Describe" can be a recall question or a hard one. The level comes from what the student has to do with the material, not from the word in the stem.
• Assuming higher is always better. You cannot analyze what you do not remember. Retrieval of facts is the base that the higher levels sit on.
• Equating level with difficulty. A remember question on obscure facts can be harder than a simple apply question. Level and difficulty are different things.
• Using it on every task. It is a planning check, not a requirement that every lesson reach the top.

The honest limits

The taxonomy is a useful framework and an unproven theory. Bloom's committee built it from the judgments of educators, not from experiments on how thinking develops, and later work has questioned whether the levels are a clean hierarchy. It helps you notice patterns, such as a test with no question above the first level, and it is weaker as a description of how minds work. For a different lens on the same problem, look at the complexity of the task itself: see depth of knowledge, which asks a separate question.

How this shows up in ClassSense

When ClassSense breaks your upload into skills, it assigns each one a Bloom level using the 1956 names (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation) and uses that to shape the content it writes for the skill. That label is a model's judgment, so treat it as a first guess. The practice questions students see are multiple choice, which limits how far up the taxonomy a question can go. A multiple choice item can ask for application and analysis, but "create" is still something you assign on paper or in class.

If you want to write your own stems at each level, the question stem builder is a quick place to start, and writing learning objectives covers the verb-choosing part.

Common questions