The old school taxonomy from 1956, a staircase with a strong hierarchical relationship between the levels.
By now we all know Bloom’s taxonomy, this seminal way of thinking about students’ learning hierarchically from lower- to higher-cognitive skills. Published in 1956, this work has driven instructional content design for decades, literally. This was also a serious group effort with a group of experts led by Benjamin S. Bloom meeting a year over a period of 7 years. Indeed, this was not your lone wolf/mad scientist discovery, but a bubbling experience. This group of experts had simple enough goals, create a common language for educators to plan their lessons across the curriculum. Language is powerful, allowing people to not talk past each other when discussing the same things. We see that all the time in many fields, each part of a field discusses their own area using their jargon and argue for their truth when meeting with the field as a whole … however, they all talk about the same things but with different names. Ideally, people realize that and agree on a common language or at least stop argue straw men. Nonetheless, before “Bloom et al. 1956” the field of education did not have a common language.
A great example of “talking past each other” was further solved in the field of biology by Tinbergen’s four questions (1963). I said further as Mayr’s dichotomy (“how vs why” in 1961) opens up the path to this work.
The idea here, with the specific example above, is that one can look at a bird song at four different angles that are not competing with each other in terms of being the true explanation. Think of the left and right columns as the mechanism (how) and evolution (why) questions respectively; whereas, think of the top and bottom rows as proximal and distal explanations respectively.
With that in mind, for example, you can see that explaining how a bird sings following the proximal mechanistic way (top left) is only one way to explain a bird song and is in no way conflicting or refuting an explanation along the distal evolutionary way (bottom right). Those complement each other and only answering all four questions gives us a full picture of birds singing.
The picture was taken from “Bateson & Laland (2013) Tinbergen’s four questions: an appreciation and an update. TREE 1757, 1-7”
Tinbergen, N. (1963) On aims and methods of ethology. Zeitschr. Tierpsychol. 20, 410–433
Mayr, E. (1961) Cause and effect in biology. Science 134, 1501–1506
Initially, Bloom’s taxonomy was strictly hierarchical in nature meaning that students first needed to know stuff before they could understand them (think of a staircase). This assumption is relaxed in the revised version of the taxonomy. Indeed, the first category, knowledge, is broken up into four components and is integrated into all other categories while a new highest category is created, metacognition. If you’ve followed me so far you should be thinking about a table as the taxonomy is now two-dimensional! The hierarchy is still respected, but it is relaxed allowing concepts to cross-reference each other in a healthy way.
Bloom’s taxonomy revised in a table form modified from table 1 in “Krathwohl David R (2002) A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy: An Overview. Theory in Practice 41 (4): 212-218.”
The purpose of this new taxonomy is similar to the first version. It aims at allowing course objective assessment to identify missing spots. It can also be applied on exams, tests, and assignments, in general, to make sure we are assessing students along the lines we want. There is no need for me to go at length into explanations of each component of the table above when I’m standing on the shoulders of giants: “A Model of Learning Objectives–based on A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives by Rex Heer, Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, Iowa State University.” This resource explains it all and also has the best three-dimensional representation of this revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy I’ve seen around (see picture below).
As you can see, the hierarchical nature of the taxonomy is still present (there is a staircase); however, it is relaxed in the sense that the staircase has many paths now.
Source: A Model of Learning Objectives–based on A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives by Rex Heer, Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, Iowa State University.
A great representation of what metacognition can do for every learner (form https://spencerauthor.com/metacognition/).
The main reason for my espousal of the revised Bloom’s taxonomy instead of sticking to the old one is not just because it’s new or because it was done by one of the original authors. I just love the fact that metacognition is added to the framework! A well-known axiom is “You Can’t Change What You Can’t See” and this applies here. We can rely on Bloom’s taxonomy all day to design our assignments, but if our students are not asked to reflect on their learning they will simply keep doing what they do already. In other words, teaching content is not enough and, frankly, it is not our job. Teaching how to learn is at the core of our job (using our content of choice).
The idea is that we are just a step on a student’s journey and they take our class for many reasons. Focusing on our content will only reach one specific type of student and only teach them very limited things. In order to offer something that all can use, why not teaching our students how to learn? Revolutionary, I know, but you would be surprised to learn that few really do that. At least, that’s what I hear from my students, nobody has taken the time to tell them what they need to do to truly learn (not just memorize) things. Maybe they were told, but we know that’s not enough, they need to be taught (model what good looks like, repeat, repeat, ask them to reflect, allow for mistakes and redos, etc.). Is it the students’ fault? Too easy, we don’t control that or what happened in their lives before our classes (our during for that matter). What we control is what we teach them in our classes.
Thus, let’s stop blaming our predecessors or (worst) our students. Let’s take control of the learning experience in our classrooms and provide our students with the tools they’ll need to be successful in college, not just in our class. If you are not teaching metacognition in your classroom, are you even teaching anything at all?!
Following the “give someone a fish versus teach them how to fish” axiom, we can think of metacognition this way:
“Give students knowledge and they will only (briefly) learn your content; teach students how to learn and they’ll learn whatever they want, all their life, and it’ll stick.”