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Assessment
Primer: Learning Taxonomies
Learning Taxonomies
Beginning in 1948, a group of educators undertook the task of
classifying education goals and objectives. The intention
was to develop a classification system for three domains:
- Cognitive domain (intellectual capability, mental skills, i.e., Knowledge)
- Affective domain (growth in feelings, emotions, or behavior,
i.e., Attitude)
- Psychomotor domain (manual or physical skills, i.e., Skills)
This taxonomy of learning behaviors can be thought of as the goals
of training; i.e., after a training session, the learner should
have acquired new skills, knowledge, and/or attitudes.
Cognitive Domain - Bloom's Taxonomy
Work on the cognitive domain was completed in 1956 and is commonly
referred to as Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain,
since the editor of the volume was Benjamin S. Bloom, although
the full title was Taxonomy of educational objectives: The
classification of educational goals. Handbook I: Cognitive domain,
1956 by Longman Inc. with the text having four other authors (Max
D. Engelhart, Edward J. Furst, Walker H. Hill, and David R. Krathwohl).
Bloom identified six levels within the cognitive domain, from
the simple recall or recognition of facts, as the lowest level,
through increasingly more complex and abstract mental levels, to
the highest order which is classified as evaluation.
A description of the six levels is given here
(1 page  ).
Bloom, et al indicated …
“[Bloom’s] Taxonomy is designed to be a classification
of the student behaviors which represent the intended
outcomes of the educational process. It is
assumed that essentially the same classes of behavior may be observed
in the usual range of subject-matter content of different levels
of education (elementary, high school, college), and in different
schools. Thus a single set of classification should be
applicable in all these circumstances.
What we are classifying is the intended behaviors of students – the
ways in which individuals are to think, act or feel, as a result
of participating in some unit of instruction. (Only such
of those intended behaviors as are related to mental acts of
thinking are included in the part of the Taxonomy developed in
the handbook for the cognitive domain.)
It is recognized that the actual behaviors of
the students after they have completed the unit of instruction
may differ in degree as well as kind from the intended behavior
specified by the objectives. That is the effects of instruction
may be such that the students do not learn a given skill to any
degree.
We initially limited ourselves to those objectives referred
to as knowledge, intellectual abilities, and intellectual skills. (This
area, which we named the cognitive domain, may also be described
as including the behavior; remembering; reasoning, problem solving;
concept formation, and to a limited extent creative thinking.)”
In essence, the authors foreshadowed what has come
to be known as outcomes-based assessment (Assessment
in Higher Education by Heywood 2000)
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