What Does Bloom Hierarchy Of Questioning Levels Promote
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In the words of Benjamin Bloom himself, "The purpose of education is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students." This quote encapsulates the essence of Bloom's Taxonomy, which aims to promote higher levels of thinking and learning. As per a statistic from the National Education Association, about 97% of teachers use Bloom's Taxonomy in their classrooms, highlighting its widespread acceptance and application in modern education.
The previously discussed six cognitive levels of Bloom's Taxonomy serve as a roadmap for educators to design learning experiences that target a range of intellectual skills and promote cognitive development.
One way to apply Bloom's Taxonomy in the classroom is through questioning techniques that encourage students to think at different levels of complexity. Like a gardener tending to the growth of diverse plants, teachers can cultivate students' intellectual skills by incorporating higher-order thinking questions into their lesson plans.
Moving to higher levels of the taxonomy, we next see learning objectives relating to analysis. Here is where the skills that we commonly think of as critical thinking enter. Distinguishing between fact and opinion and identifying the claims upon which an argument is built require analysis, as does breaking down an information need into its component parts in order to identify the most appropriate search terms.
Comparison of research proposal scores between the second and first quarter revealed some interesting trends. Criteria requiring the most complex thinking skills showed the most dramatic improvement (Figure 1). For example, the second quarters' students earned an average of 80% of the total possible points for discussing inherent limitations to their research design compared with only 61% in the previous quarter. Likewise, we observed a strong increase in student ability to interpret their data and design their own hypotheses, skills that require analysis and synthesis levels of Bloom's, respectively. As these data were derived from two different populations of students (fall and winter quarter), the students' scores were analyzed according to their rank order using a nonparametric Kruskal-Wallis test, which does not assume that the two data sets possess a normal distribution. Based on this analysis, all three of the most dramatic increases were found to be statistically significant (Figure 1).
During the last 5 wk of the program, students were responsible for generating and answering their own questions based on assigned reading. Groups of five to seven students were responsible for writing a total of 20 weekly questions corresponding to the chapter that was being presented in lecture. Each week, a group generated four questions at each of the five levels of Bloom's. The night before the workshop, the questions were sent to the faculty and the best questions were selected and arranged in random order with respect to Bloom's ranking; the designated rankings were excluded from the final handout. In the workshop, authors of the questions served as peer teaching assistants while the other students worked to answer and rank questions. The authors were instructed to withhold the Bloom's ranking from the other students and to assist them only with finding the appropriate textbook material for answering the questions. Students were required to individually type up their answers and rank the questions according to Bloom's. These weekly assignments were turned into the faculty for grading, but students were only graded for their responses to the assigned questions and for completing the Bloom's ranking. Although exams and homework assignments given at The Evergreen State College are graded and scored, the college does not give cumulative numerical grades but rather narrative evaluations of a student's course work. This pedagogical philosophy enhances learning communities and provides an environment for effective group work. Students were held responsible for their participation in workshops by grading their individual responses to the questions.
Skillful questioning can be very effective in enhancing the cognitive abilities of medical students, residents, fellows, and students from the various health professions. Teachers should be able to use one of the taxonomies of thinking skills described in the literature in order to pose a variety of questions corresponding to various levels of cognition. Bloom's taxonomy is very useful in this regard. It includes a hierarchy starting with knowledge as the lowest-level cognitive skill, advancing through comprehension, application, analysis, and synthesis to evaluation at the highest level. Teachers should be able to construct questions that require different levels of thinking and use them during interactive discussions. The process of effective questioning includes establishing an appropriate environment, creating a climate conducive to learning, using an appropriate mix of questions, phrasing questions accurately, interposing sufficient wait time, and using various probes in response to the answers given by students. Teachers should be trained to enhance their own questioning skills through workshops, peer observation and critique, videotaping and feedback, and use of self-study modules.
Some critiques of the taxonomy's cognitive domain admit the existence of these six categories but question the existence of a sequential, hierarchical link.[14] Often, educators view the taxonomy as a hierarchy and may mistakenly dismiss the lowest levels as unworthy of teaching.[15][16] The learning of the lower levels enables the building of skills in the higher levels of the taxonomy, and in some fields, the most important skills are in the lower levels (such as identification of species of plants and animals in the field of natural history).[15][16] Instructional scaffolding of higher-level skills from lower-level skills is an application of Vygotskian constructivism.[17][18]
Some consider the three lowest levels as hierarchically ordered, but the three higher levels as parallel.[9] Others say that it is sometimes better to move to application before introducing concepts,[citation needed] the goal being to create a problem-based learning environment where the real world context comes first and the theory second, to promote the student's grasp of the phenomenon, concept, or event.
The taxonomy is widely implemented as a hierarchy of verbs, designed to be used when writing learning outcomes, but a 2020 analysis showed that these verb lists showed no consistency between educational institutions, and thus learning outcomes that were mapped to one level of the hierarchy at one educational institution could be mapped to different levels at another institution.[20]
Another point to make clear is that the separate processes of the taxonomy can be adapted according to the age-group and ability of students, enabling them to access the different levels of taxonomy according to the overall depth of their cognition. Level 6, Creating, for example, is obviously not going to be the same for a five-year old as it would be for a sixteen-year old. Nevertheless, the hierarchy of the different levels of the taxonomy remains the same.
Teachers frequently spend a great deal of classroom time testing students through questions. In fact, observations of teachers at all levels of education reveal that most spend more than 90 percent of their instructional time testing students (through questioning). And most of the questions teachers ask are typically factual questions that rely on short-term memory.
What does all this mean? Several things, actually! It means you can ask your students several different kinds of questions. If you only focus on one type of question, your students might not be exposed to higher levels of thinking necessary to a complete understanding of a topic. If, for example, you only ask students knowledge-based questions, then your students might think that learning (a specific topic) is nothing more than the ability to memorize a select number of facts.
Bloom's Taxonomy is not grade-specific. That is, it does not begin at the lower grades (kindergarten, first, second) with knowledge and comprehension questions and move upward to the higher grades (tenth, eleventh, twelfth) with synthesis and evaluation questions. The six levels of questions are appropriate for all grade levels.
The levels follow a hierarchy, each building on the level below it. This framework can guide educators as they help students move from primary to more complex cognitive abilities and learning outcomes.
These levels can be helpful in developing learning outcomes because certain verbs are particularly appropriate at each level and not appropriate at other levels (though some verbs are useful at multiple levels). A student might list presidents or proteins or participles to demonstrate that they remember something they learned, but generating a list does not demonstrate (for example) that the student is capable of evaluating the contribution of multiple presidents to American politics or explaining protein folding or distinguishing between active and passive participles.
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