The Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, also known as Bloom’s Taxonomy, is a hierarchical ranking of important steps in the learning process. Bloom’s Taxonomy was designed to help educators classify learning so that they can better assist their students in developing skills. Benjamin Bloom and other educators at the University of Chicago created the system in 1956 with the goal of improving the educational approach.
There are three major domains in learning, according to Bloom’s Taxonomy: affective, cognitive, and psychomotor. Attitude and emotions are part of the affective domain, while critical thinking skills and knowledge are part of the cognitive domain. Various physical tasks, including object manipulation, can be found in the psychomotor domain. Each domain is ranked in order to emphasize the importance of students having a strong foundation in each area within the domain before moving on to the next.
Receiving, responding, valuing, organizing, and characterizing are the subcategories of the affective domain. Because the affective domain is heavily involved with social skills and interactions, students who develop good affective domain skills will find it easier to learn and function with others. Failure to make progress in this area can make learning difficult for a student and can affect the child’s social life.
Knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, also known as remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating, are all part of the cognitive domain. The two sets of terms reflect different Bloom’s Taxonomy organizations, with the first set being the originals and the second set being developed later as researchers refined the system. Each stage necessitates the development of distinct cognitive abilities, such as the ability to learn and absorb new information in knowledge/remembering.
Bloom’s Taxonomy includes perception, set, guided response, mechanism, adaptation, origination, and complex overt response in the psychomotor domain. The ability to learn new physical tasks to the ability to develop new physical approaches to a problem are all examples of physical skill. Because learning frequently includes a physical component, a student who struggles in the psychomotor domain may also struggle in other areas.
Bloom’s Taxonomy can be used by educators in a variety of ways. It can be incorporated into lesson plans, with teachers laying the groundwork in a variety of areas before moving on to more complex concepts, and it can also be used to assist teachers in assessing students who appear to have special needs. Identifying the areas of Bloom’s Taxonomy where a student struggles can assist a teacher in tailoring a program to help the student improve.