My son, professor Nick Meier, has posted another blog worth reading. Below is an excerpt of it. for the rest you can go to his blog: (http://www.nicholasmeier.com)
Bloom’s Taxonomy
by Nicholas Meier
On the theme of popular ideas that I feel a need to critique….
Bloom’s taxonomy has been around for a long time as an aid to teachers, presented as a hierarchy of sophistication of thinking. I was first introduced to it when I started teaching in the 1980s. The college where I currently teach asks all of their instructors to keep it in mind when developing and teaching their courses.
I have two central problems with Bloom’s taxonomy, both of which I will discuss. Then I will mention how it can be used positively.
First of all, when I have used Bloom’s list, or the new revised list, to analyze a lesson and to think about which categories are being tapped into, I find it hard to pigeonhole activities or questions. My teacher education students and I often find that we can put the same questions into multiple categories depending on how we interpret them. In other words, real ideas and lessons do not seem to fit neatly into these categories, and getting agreement on categories is not intuitive, making them less useful. For instance the top of the six categories is: Creating, putting information together in innovative ways. But “Applying” (third level from bottom) on one chart I am reading is listed as using the knowledge gained (level 2) in new ways. What is the difference between applying knowledge in a new way and being creative or innovative?
A bigger problem I have with Bloom’s taxonomy is that they are presented as a hierarchy, and Bloom meant them that way. In this hierarchy the first stage is knowledge or remembering. In other words, rote learning comes first. The next level, understanding, is that then we learn the meaning of what we memorized…
(to read the rest to to http://www.nicholasmeier.com)
Filed under: 2013 posts | Tagged: blooms taxonomy |
Deborah Meier on Education 