Bloom reheated

In an age of digital media, where learners create, remix and share their own content, an overhaul of Bloom's Cognitive Taxonomy was long overdue. Yesterday I posted a critique of Bloom's Cognitive Taxonomy and argued that it is outmoded in the digital age. Unfortunately, Lorin Anderson's revised model (2001 in conjunction with Krathwohl) of the taxonomy is not as great an improvement on the original model as its adherents might claim. Supposedly upgraded to take into consideration new ways of learning using digital tools, the revised model remains firmly rooted in the old behaviourist paradigm, and is just as reliant on the production of observable (and therefore) measurable behaviour as the original model. This is not surprising, because Anderson is one of Bloom's former students, and Bloom was steeped in the behaviourist tradition. However, one useful feature of Anderson's model is that it slides the focus away from declarative knowledge (knowing that) toward procedural knowledge (knowing how), and this is useful in constructionist learning contexts (learning by making - See for example the work of Seymour Papert). If students learn facts, but have no understanding of how or why these facts can be applied, or how they can be constructed into some useful form, learning is two-dimensional.

One of the gravest errors in Anderson's revised model is that it's still a taxonomy. It is flawed at that. Anderson's new categorisation simply moves the old categories around a little. He places 'Creating' at the apex of the pyramid, with 'Evaluating' beneath it. Overbaugh and Schultz (2005) suggest that in Anderson's model, Bloom's Synthesis is replaced by 'Creating', and that Bloom's 'Evaluation' and 'Synthesis' therefore trade places. This raises a question - should we really expect learners to create something and then not bother to evaluate it? So why the swap? The problem lies in the sequence. Ultimately, synthesis and evaluation, along with all the other levels of cognitive achievement cannot be represented as a single linear process. Let's suppose instead that learning processes are chaotic and iterative in nature, and that we learn through a continual flux of categories, combined in increasingly complex ways. We might acquire better knowledge while we are in the process of applying and evaluating, for example. This leads to the conclusion that the classification of 'levels' of attainment is misrepresented in both Bloom's and Anderson's models. Tim Brook makes the point that the sequence of learning categories is problematic and suggests a matrix instead. But this still fails to address the problem that Bloom's taxonomy segregates and compartmentalises activities, when often we learn across and through combinations of learning modes.

Neither Bloom's nor Anderson's models take new, fluid methods of learning into consideration. Emerging theories such as connectivism, heutagogy and paragogy are more representative of digital age learning, and for many, the future of learning through and with digital tools will rely heavily upon such explanatory frameworks. We need to find ways to nurture the agile, flexible, critical and creative learners we desperately need in our communities today. Neither Bloom's nor Anderson's taxonomies can achieve this. Patching up an old model and rehashing it just won't do. As John Lennon once put it: 'You can't reheat a soufflé.'

Anderson's Revision Model image source

References

Anderson, L.W., and D. Krathwohl (Eds.) (2001). A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching and Assessing: a Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Longman, New York.

Overbaugh, R. C. and Schultz, L. (2005) Bloom's Taxonomy. Available online at:  http://www.odu.edu/educ/roverbau/Bloom/blooms_taxonomy.htm (Accessed 21 June, 2012)

Bloom's taxonomy rehashed by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.