Part III Design for Educational Technology
8.2 Learning Activity Design
8.2.2 Bloom ’s Taxonomy
The primary purpose of learning objective analysis is to find out what learning outcome the learners can obtain after learning a specific part of the content, such as knowledge, skills, and so on. There are many ways to characterize learning objectives, and it requires a target classification framework to interpret systemati-cally. Bloom’s taxonomy is a familiar classic classification framework for analyzing the learning objectives.
Benjamin S. Bloom (1956) developed a hierarchy of educational objectives, which is referred to as Bloom’s taxonomy, which covers the learning objectives in three domains: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor.
• The cognitive domain includes intellectual skills and knowledge processing, which is the primary focus of most traditional education and is frequently used to structure curriculum learning objectives, assessments, and activities.
• The affective domain represents objectives that are concerned with attitudes and feelings.
• The psychomotor domain concerns what students might do physically.
(Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001; Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia, 1964; Bloom, 1956)
8.2.2.1 Cognitive Domain
Bloom’s taxonomy within the cognitive domain includes the six levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The six levels are classified hierarchically from the simplest action to the high-order thinking actions (Bloom,1956). The six levels of Bloom’s taxonomy were arranged in a cumulative hierarchical framework, that is, achievement of complex skill or ability required achievement of the prior one (Krathwohl,2002).
(1) Knowledge
• Deals primarily with the ability to memorize and recall specific facts
• Example: Name common varieties of apple.
(2) Comprehension
• Involves the ability to interpret, and demonstrate students’ basic under-standing of ideas
• Example: Compare the identifying characteristics of a Golden Delicious apple with a Granny Smith apple.
(3) Application
• Involves the ability to apply concepts and principles to novel practical situations
• Example: Would apples prevent scurvy, a disease caused by a deficiency in vitamin C?
(4) Analysis
• Involves the ability to analyze concepts and separate concepts or principles into components
• Example: List four ways of serving foods made with apples and explain which ones have the highest health benefits. Provide references to support your statements.
(5) Synthesis
• Involves the ability to blend elements and parts to form a whole
• Example: Convert an “unhealthy” recipe for apple pie to a “healthy” recipe by replacing your choice of ingredients. Explain the health benefits of using the ingredients you chose versus the original ones.
(6) Evaluation
• Involves the ability to make judgments of the value of a work
• Example: Which kinds of apples are best for baking a pie, and why?
8.2.2.2 Affective Domain
The affective domain relates to emotions, attitudes, appreciations, and values, such as enjoying, conserving, respecting, and supporting. The affective domain is divi-ded intofive main subcategories: receiving, responding, valuing, organization, and characterization (Spector,2015).
(1) Receiving
• Students pay attention passively, and it is about the student’s memory and recognition as well. Without receiving, no learning can occur.
(2) Responding
• Students participate learning process activity. They not only attend to a stimulus but also reacts in sometimes and some way.
(3) Valuing
• Students attach and associate a value or some values to an object, phe-nomenon, or piece of information, and even the knowledge they acquired.
(4) Organizing
• Students can put different values, information, and ideas and accommodate them within their schema together. They can compare, relate, and elaborate on what has been learned.
(5) Characterizing
• Students can build abstract knowledge.
8.2.2.3 Psychomotor Domain
Bloom has not compiled the taxonomy of the psychomotor domain, but several competing taxonomies for the psychomotor domain (e.g., Dave 1970; Simpson 1966) have been created over the years. The psychomotor domain concerns things students might physically do. One popular versions of the taxonomy for the psy-chomotor domain belongs to Dave (1970), who presents the five levels of the psychomotor domain as imitation, manipulation, precision, articulation, and naturalization.
8.2.2.4 Case Study
When design learning objective, it should be specific, operational, and measurable.
Case: The Learning Objective ofNewton’s First Law
• Explain the content and meaning of Newton’s first law (cognitive-comprehension).
• Illustrate and explain the simple phenomenon of daily life that resulted from the inertia (cognitive-comprehension).
• Experience the difficulty of the scientific research process, and realize the experimental and reasoning scientific research methods (affective).
8.2.2.5 Extended Reading
With the development of learning theory, scholars have revised and improved Bloom’s taxonomy. Also, in the research field of objective classification, there are other scholars proposed different learning objectives’ classification framework from different perspectives.
(1) Revised Taxonomy
Bloom’s taxonomy is a scheme for classifying educational goals, objectives, and standards. It provides an organizational structure and a common meaning to learning objectives classified in one of its categories.
Lorin W. Anderson and David R. Krathwohl revisited the cognitive domain in the learning taxonomy to reflect a positive form of thinking and made some changes, such as changing the names from noun to verb forms, and slightly rear-ranging them (Anderson & Krathwohl,2001). In contrast to the single dimension of the original taxonomy, the revised framework is two-dimensional, cognitive process and knowledge dimension.
The cognitive process dimension contains six categories from cognitively simple to cognitively complex: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create.
The knowledge dimension contains four categories from concrete to abstract:
factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive.
In the revised taxonomy, the cognitive process dimension has six levels that are arranged in a hierarchical structure, but not as rigidly as in the original taxonomy (Krathwohl,2002). In combination, the knowledge and cognitive process dimen-sions form a handy Table8.1, the taxonomy table (see Table 8.1).
(2) Gagné’s taxonomy Gagné proposed five categories of learning objective:
verbal information, intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, motor skills, and atti-tudes. Gagné and Bloom represent learning objectives in different aspects, that Bloom’s classification is more from the “form” of the learning objectives, and Gagné’s classification is mainly from the “content” point of view, and he did not subdivide affective and psychomotor domain. Gagne assumed that different types of learning outcomes required different learning conditions (Gagné,1987).