Page 137 - Educational Technology A Primer for the 21st Century

128 8 Designing Learning Activities and Instructional Systems
8.2.2 Bloom’s Taxonomy

The primary purpose of learning objective analysis is to find out what learning
outcome the learners can obtain after learning a specific part of the content, such as
knowledge, skills, and so on. There are many ways to characterize learning
objectives, and it requires a target classification framework to interpret systemati-
cally. Bloom’s taxonomy is a familiar classic classification framework for analyzing
the learning objectives.
Benjamin S. Bloom (1956) developed a hierarchy of educational objectives,
which is referred to as Bloom’s taxonomy, which covers the learning objectives in
three domains: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor.

• The cognitive domain includes intellectual skills and knowledge processing,
which is the primary focus of most traditional education and is frequently used
to structure curriculum learning objectives, assessments, and activities.
• The affective domain represents objectives that are concerned with attitudes and
feelings.
• The psychomotor domain concerns what students might do physically.

(Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001; Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia, 1964; Bloom,
1956)

8.2.2.1 Cognitive Domain
Bloom’s taxonomy within the cognitive domain includes the six levels: knowledge,
comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The six levels are
classified hierarchically from the simplest action to the high-order thinking actions
(Bloom, 1956). The six levels of Bloom’s taxonomy were arranged in a cumulative
hierarchical framework, that is, achievement of complex skill or ability required
achievement of the prior one (Krathwohl, 2002).

(1) Knowledge
• Deals primarily with the ability to memorize and recall specific facts

• Example: Name common varieties of apple.

(2) Comprehension

• Involves the ability to interpret, and demonstrate students’ basic under-
standing of ideas
• Example: Compare the identifying characteristics of a Golden Delicious
apple with a Granny Smith apple.