7/27/2019 64 Blooms Taxonomy

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/64-blooms-taxonomy 1/5

 

 Anchorage School District

 Tip #64: Bloom’s Taxonomy

Bloom’s Taxonomy. Higher orderthinking skills. Levels of questions. Nomatter what it’s called, the goal is the same – rigorous thinking. How to we get

beyond a literal level of discussion thatmost of our students are satisfied with?One way is to make sure that studentsunderstand the various levels of thinking.

"Benjamin Bloom (1956) developed aclassification of levels of intellectualbehavior in learning. This taxonomycontained three overlapping domains: thecognitive, psychomotor, and affective. Within the cognitive domain, he identifiedsix levels: knowledge, comprehension,application, analysis, synthesis, andevaluation. These domains and levels arestill useful today as you develop thecritical thinking skills of your students."

 The above historical blurb is fromhttp://eduscapes.com/tap/topic69.htm,and serves as a reminder of how we canimprove critical thinking skills in our ownclassrooms.

 The link below offers a color-coded chartlisting the increasing sophistication ofthinking skills, provides a list of verbs tohelp construct activities at each level, anddescribes a differentiated lesson plan for writing compound sentences. It is a greatoverview if you need to brush up onBloom's Taxonomy.

http://cs1.mcm.edu/~awyatt/csc3315/bloom.htm 

Vocabulary Booklet

Let's start with a graphic organizer. I toldyou that I had many uses for the vocabulary booklet in last week's email tip.Have students create a 6-flap vocabularybooklet in order to organize theinformation about Bloom's Taxonomy.Label each flap with a level of thinking inthis order:

recalling informationunderstanding informationapplying informationanalyzing informationsynthesizing informationevaluating information

Now use the Write Source 2000 handbookto introduce students to each level ofthinking. Use pp. 283-290. Show yourstudents how knowing these levels ofthinking can help them on classroom

assignments and assessments. The mini-unit uses the theme of the California goldrush to model how different levels ofthinking are used. In each case, athorough student writing model isprovided. The first exercise shows a fill-in-the-blank worksheet (recallinginformation) and gets increasingly more

Literacy TipsTips for middle school educators on

various topics such as grammar,writing, reading, spelling, vocabulary,

cooperative learning and more. Contact: Amy GoodmanMiddle School Literacy Support

907-267-0221goodman_amy@asdk12.orgwww.asdk12.org/MiddleLink/LA/

7/27/2019 64 Blooms Taxonomy

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/64-blooms-taxonomy 2/5

 

 Anchorage School District

Literacy Tips

 difficult until students are asked toevaluate information in the form of anopen-ended paragraph.

Hooked on Thinking

“Hooked on Thinking” was just publishedin the April, 2004 issue of The Reading

Teacher . Ann Paziotopoulos and MarianneKroll write about how to make Bloom’s Taxonomy more applicable to literaturediscussions. In this article, the authorsrefer to one of my favorite quotes byOliver Wendell Holmes. He uses ametaphor comparing the intellect ofpeople to multi-level homes. I have

created a blackline master for you to usein the classroom that shows thiscomparison visually. Holmes says, “Thebest illumination comes from above,through the skylight.”

Skyscraper Thinking

Pazziotopoulos and Kroll created theirown classroom analogy using a skyscraper with its feature of ascending floors. “The

floors symbolize the effort needed toreach the next level. The graphic alsoconveys an enhanced view or broadenedperspective from the top floor…” Usethe Skyscraper Thinking sheet as a way tomodel higher level questioning with yourstudents. When discussing Little Red

Riding Hood , ask the students to recall thefacts. What did the wolf do to trick LittleRed Riding Hood? For the evaluationlevel, ask students to pretend they are the

 wolf and write a short paragraphdefending the wolf's actions.

 Then move to more sophisticatedliterature from your grade level anthologyto model these levels of thinking. Askstudents to recall such details as what vexed the narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart ?

Have the students compare and contrastthe narrator before and after the policearrive. Can students think about whatmight have happened after the narrator

confessed to murdering the old man at theend of the story? If students pretended tobe the judge at the murder trial, whatsentence would they give the narrator and why? The higher students climb thefloors of the skyscraper, the more effort ittakes and the more their views change. The top floor allows them to acquire agreater understanding of the literaturebecause it provides them with sweeping views helping them to create the bigpicture.

 Attached is the Skyscraper Thinkingblackline master to use with your students.I have also provided an example blacklinemaster copied from the article written byPaziotopoulos and Kroll that models howyou might also use this as an assessmenttool. The example provided is one from ahealth class asking students todemonstrate their knowledge of thecirculatory system.

7/27/2019 64 Blooms Taxonomy

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/64-blooms-taxonomy 3/5

“There are one-st ory i nt el l ect s,

t w o-st ory i ntel l ect s, and 

t hree-st ory i ntel l ect s w i t h 

sky l i ght s. A l l fact col l ect ors, w ho 

have no aim beyond t hei r facts,

are one-story men. Two-story 

men compare, reason, general i ze,

usi ng t he l abors of t he fact 

col l ect ors as w el l as t hei r ow n.

Three-story men i deal i ze,

imagine, predi ct - t hei r best 

i l l umi nat i on comes from above,

t hrough t he sky l i ght .” 

Three-Story Intelle

- Oliver Wendall Holmes

7/27/2019 64 Blooms Taxonomy

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/64-blooms-taxonomy 4/5

Knowledge (recall facts)

Comprehension (summarize/explain)

Skyscraper

Thinking

Application (relate to real life)

Analysis (compare/contrast)

Evaluation (give an opinion)

Synthesis (create something new)

Source: Paziotopoulos, Ann and Marianne Kroll. “Hooked on Thinking.” The Reading Teacher. April 2004: 672-677. 

7/27/2019 64 Blooms Taxonomy

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/64-blooms-taxonomy 5/5

Knowledge (recall facts)

Comprehension (summarize/explain)

Skyscraper

Thinking

Application (relate to real life)

Analysis (compare/contrast)

Evaluation (give an opinion)

Synthesis (create something new)

Draw and label the parts of the human heart.

Describe the functions of each part of the heart.

Describe what you do to keep your heart healthy.

Compare and contrast the lifestyles of a person with a healthy

heart versus a person with heart disease.

Describe the journey of a blood cell through the arteries of an

unhealthy heart.

Knowing what you know about a heart-healthy lifestyle,

evaluate a friend or a relative s lifestyle and make recommendations.

Source: Paziotopoulos, Ann and Marianne Kroll. “Hooked on Thinking.” The Reading Teacher. April 2004: 672-677.