Anderson, Krathwohl, Airasian, Cruikshank, Mayer, Pintrich, et al. (2001) is the state of the art concerning Bloom’s Taxonomy. I found the second chapter particularly helpful putting together a recent online “mini-course” for my Instruction Delivery Systems course.
The taxonomy has been revised to two dimensions: knowledge and cognitive processes. The knowledge dimension (KD) incorporates four areas: factual, conceptual, procedural, and meta-cognitive. The cognitive processes dimension (CPD) includes remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. Notice that the KD is all nouns and the CPD is verbs. The KD is basically the material that is to be taught/learned and the CPD is how that material is to be taught/learned. The chapter continues with a discussion of types of objectives: global, educational, and instructional. The global ones may take months or even years to learn. Educational objectives are the global objectives broken down into more manageable chunks. The instructional objectives are the day-to-day activities that are designed to help reach the educational objectives. One thing the authors (Anderson et al., 2001) stress is that we should not be using phrases like “be able to” or “learn to” when we create our objectives (p. 17). These are implicit in our preparation of our objectives.
There is also a section on the problems with using objectives. Personally, I think there are going to be many problems using these objectives with my main work, namely teaching English to Japanese university science students. Language is not a set of skills that can be taught like math, etc. (although it is often taught that way in this country). We also have to be careful heading into the meta-cognitive areas because too much grammatical and lexical information can cause another set of problems. I will have to look into this more later.
Reference
Anderson, L. W., Krathwohl, D. R., Airasian, P. W., Cruikshank, K. A., Mayer, R. E., Pintrich, P. R., et al. (Eds.). (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Longman.
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