A helpful tool for writing objectives is Bloom’s Taxonomy. Bloom’s Taxonomy is a classification of learning objectives proposed in 1956 by a committee of educators chaired by Benjamin Bloom. Bloom edited the first volume of the standard text, Taxonomy of educational objectives: the classification of educational goal. Needless to say, Bloom’s taxonomy has been an important tool for educators for quite some time.
Bloom’s Taxonomy divides educational objectives into three “domains”: Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor (sometimes loosely described as knowing/head, feeling/heart and doing/hands respectively). Within the domains, learning at the higher levels is dependent on having attained prerequisite knowledge and skills at lower levels. A goal of Bloom’s Taxonomy is to motivate educators to focus on all three domains, creating a more holistic form of education.
In higher education, we primarily dwell in the Cognitive Domain. Skills in the cognitive domain center around knowledge, comprehension, and critical thinking on a particular topic. Traditional education tends to emphasize the skills in this domain, particularly the lower-order objectives.
There are six levels in the taxonomy, moving through the lowest order processes to the highest:
- Remember
- Understand
- Apply
- Analysis
- Evaluate
- Create
Watch this LinkedIn tutorial on Applying Bloom’s taxonomy from Elearning Essentials: Instructional Design by Samantha Calamari. (You must be logged into the University of Memphis SSI to view.)
Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Objectives List
Bloom’s Taxonomy provides key action verbs (behaviors) to use when writing course objectives at various levels of thinking. A course often focuses on foundational skills and then moves students into more advanced levels of thinking. You may notice that your learning objectives start out with a focus on knowledge and comprehension and evolve to more application, analysis and synthesis based objectives once foundational content has been mastered.
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