Revised Bloom's Taxonomy for Instructional Objectives

In 1956, Benjamin S. Bloom alongwith his associates presented a taxonomy of educational objectives related to cognitive domain of the learner's behaviour. In this taxonomy he classified the cognitive process into six categories, namely - 

1. Knowledge 

2. Comprehension 

3. Application 

4. Analysis 

5. Synthesis 

6. Evaluation 

With the passage of time, the scholars in this field felt a need of revising this taxonomy. As a result, L. W. Anderson and D. R. Krathwohl let a team of experts in revising Bloom's taxonomy. 

The revised taxonomy also has six divisions of the cognitive processes much like the former one. These categories with their hierarchical order are - 

1. Remembering - Remembering or recognizing something without necessarily understanding, using or changing it. 

2. Understanding - Understanding the material being communicated without necessarily relating it to anything else. 

3. Applying - Using a general concept to solve a particular problem. 

4. Analyzing - Breaking something down into its parts. 

5. Evaluating - Judging the value of material or methods as they might be applied. 

6. Creating - Creating a new thing/idea with the integration or coordination of different ideas.

Comparison between the two taxonomies

Although it too has six divisions, it differs in nomenclature and functionability in some significant ways. The analysis of the contents provided in these two versions of Taxonomy may help us in drawing following conclusions- 

1. Both the taxonomies have tried to classify the cognitive process into six categories in a hierarchical order arranged from the lowest to highest. 

2. They differ from each other in terms of nomenclature as under -

   1. The revised taxonomy has used verbs in place of nouns used in the original taxonomy. 

   2. Most of the names for categories has been replaced, e.g.- Knowledge by Remembering etc. The logic for this replacement has been provided as below - 

      • A learner first tries to remember what he has already learned or memorized. It may exist in the form of knowledge but the cognitive process at this time he undergoes is remembering. 

      • The word understanding represents an active cognitive process in a more proper way unable to be conveyed through the term comprehension. 

      • When one is able to understand, apply and analyse a concept then it should be naturally followed by a cognitive process named evaluating. The word synthesis used in original taxonomy doesnot suit much to describe this cognitive functioning stage. 

      • The highest stage of one's cognitive functioning makes him competent enough to create something new or novel out of his learning endeavour. The former team evaluation used in the original version is unable to describe such final creative functioning of the learner. 

3. Another major difference between two taxonomies is that revised taxonomy is two dimensional whereas the original has only one dimension. The two dimensions of the revised taxonomy are the knowledge dimension and the cognitive process dimension.
   
   Moreover knowledge of something related to a subject maybe classified into four distinct dimensions called factual, conceptual, procedural and metacognitive knowledge. 
   
   For the cognitive process dimensions, revised taxonomy already prescribes six divisions called remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating.
   
   As a result, the intersection of the four knowledge dimensions and six cognitive process dimensions may provide 24 cells making the taxonomy table two dimensional as below-

In this way, revised Bloom's taxonomy has been capable enough to pin point the type of cognitive processes undergoing at the time of acquiring the knowledge of something at its varying levels.

Writing objectives in the revised taxonomy

We need action verbs for writing the instructional objectives of a topic in a teaching subject. The relevant action verbs under the different categories and subcategories of cognitive process are as below. These can be used for writing instructional objectives for the teaching-learning of any topic of a subject.