Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy and Assessment
This is an update to a wiki page on Educational Origami on Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy and Assessment
Higher order thinking skills like analysis, evaluation and creativity incorperate lower order thinking skills like remembering, understanding and applying. We aim to teach and facilitate higher order thinking skills in our teaching, knowing that these higher order skills will scaffold better learning and ownership of concepts and processes. But what do we examine when we set our students tests or examination?
If we look at our tests and examinations are they focused toward Higher Order or Lower Order Thinking skills? Are the assessment tasks and questions open or closed?
We are required to assess our students to:
- measure their progress,
- to track their learning,
- to identify weakness
- to measure our own performance as educators.
Parents need a measure of their childrens progress, politicians and administrators need to measure how their money is being spent. Assessment, often in the form of tests and examinations, is used for all of this. This is not wrong but Assessment should primarily be for learning (Well done AFL)
This raises some fundemental questions about our assessment systems
- Do our assessment systems do our students justice?
- Do the assessment systems reflect our students learning?
- Do they reflect the higher order thinking skills that we should be teaching our students in the 21st Century?
- Is a 3 hour test a fair reflection on a years or semesters work?
- Does a test or examination adequately prepare our students for work? How many workplaces have examinations as a measure of performance?
Does a one, two or three hour examination, sat in isolation from information sources and reference give a student adequate time to develop analysis, evaluate and be creative? To reflect critically on a year or mores work? Is it realistic to expect a student to complete these in close book format, when in the “real world” they would have a plethera of resources at their finger tips?
We know that in the knowledge economy of the 21st Century, Higher order thinking skills are valued and are indeed essential. But, do our assessments reflect higher or lower order thinking?
Key verbs in Bloom’s and 3 story Intellect
If we look at Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy or perhaps its simplified cousin the Art Costa’s Three Story Intellect, many of the verbs we associate with examination and test questions reflect lower order thinking skills.
| Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy | Art Costa’s three story intellect | |
|---|---|---|
| Lower Order Thinking | ||
| Remembering | Recognising, Listing, Describing, Identifying, Retrieving, naming, Locating, Finding, bullet pointing, highlighting, bookmarking, social networking, social bookmarking, favouriting/local bookmarking, searching & googling. | Gathering information Count, Define, Match, Observe, Select, Describe, Identify, List, Observe, Name & Recite. |
| Understanding | Interpreting, Summarising, inferring, paraphrasing, classifying, comparing, explaining, exemplifying, advanced searches, Boolean searches, blog journaling, twittering, catergorising, tagging, commenting, annotating & subscribing. | Processing information Analyse, Categorise, Compare/Contrast, Explain, Infer, Make, Analogies, Sequence, Synthesize & Sort. |
| Applying | Implementing, carrying out, using, executing, running, loading, playing, operating, hacking, uploading, sharing & editing. | |
| Analysing | Comparing, organising, deconstructing, attributing, outlining, finding, structuring, integrating, mashing, linking, validating, reverse engineering & cracking. | |
| Evaluating | Checking, hypothesising, critiquing, experimenting, judging, testing, detecting, monitoring, blog commenting/critiquing, reviewing, posting, moderating, collaborating, networking, refactoring & testing. | Applying Information. Apply a principle, Evaluate, Forecast, Hypothesize, Imagine, Assess, Predict, Speculate, Judge, if/then, Idealize & Generalise. |
| Creating | Designing, constructing, planning, producing, inventing, devising, making, programming, filming, animating, blogging video blogging, mixing, re-mixing, wiki-ing, publishing, videocasting, podcasting, directing & broadcasting | |
| Higher Order Thinking | ||
Common key verbs in examinations
What are the key verbs we use in our examinations. I examine several examinations recently and these were the key verbs.
- list (Remembering)
- state (Remembering)
- identify (Remembering)
- name (Remembering)
- describe (Remembering)
- comment (Understanding)
- discuss (Understanding)
- explain (Understanding)
- exemplify (Understanding)
- compare (Analyse)
- analyse (Analyse)
- evaluate (Evaluate)
These are predominently lower order thinking skills. Examinations can be a poor tool to measure higher order thinking.
Fortunately, examinations are not the only form of assessment we use with our students, but do the other types of assessment actually reflect Higher Order Thinking. Do the assessment tasks reflect the higher order goals and objectives or are they more of the same.
Do we put suitable emphasis on:
- developing a hypothesis (Evaluating)
- experimenting (Evaluating)
- planning (Creating)
- designing (Creating)
- judging and evaluating (Evaluating)
- producing and making (Creating)
- critiquing, reviewing and testing (Evaluating)
- refining (Creating)
- mixing and remixing (Creating)
These can not be easily tested adequately in an examination or test
June 28th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Well written! Often more than ever have I seen tests and exams being used as the only source of assessments. There are so many alternatives out there that speak to the different types of learning styles we have present in the classroom. In today’s society, we really need to reach out to those who are artistic and tech-savvy. I have tried to find ways to dig into those styles in the English classroom. It may not always be easy, but I have found by giving different approaches to the assessments, the students tend to give me more of their all than being sat down with a quiz!
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July 1st, 2009 at 3:15 am
[...] second is a blog post about assessment and Bloom’s Digital. What I like about this is that he echoes a lot of [...]
July 1st, 2009 at 8:46 am
Alternative assessment is very important to not only reach the various levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, but to make sure students are really learning. Different assessments are also great ways to provide meaningful learning experiences for students. Intriguing projects to which students can relate are a great way to assess learning, and students won’t even realize they are being “tested.” Technology opens many windows to assessment, and giving students the opportunity to work with forms of technology in the classroom gives them chances to learn required information with a familiar avenue (since we all know that our students probably know more than we do about technology!).
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