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References:

Anderson, L. (2002, January). Benjamin Samuel Bloom (1913-1999). American

Psychologist, 57(1), p. 63. http://web.a.ebscohost.com.proxy-library.ashford.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=af9fccb7-81f6-47f3-853d-c4e27113a233%40sessionmgr4001&vid=1&hid=4107

Brandt, R. (1979, November). A Conversation with Benjamin Bloom. Educational Leadership, pp. 157-161. http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el_197911_brandt2.pdf

Doughty, H.A. (2006). Blooming Idiots: Educational Objectives, Learning Taxonomies and the Pedagogy of Benjamin Bloom. College Quarterly, 9(4), p. 1-23. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ835427.pdf

Guskey, T.R. (2007). Closing Achievement Gaps: Revisiting Benjamin S. Bloom’s “Learning for Mastery”. Journal of Advanced Academics, 19(1), pp. 8-31. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ786608.pdf

McKeachie, W.J. & Sims, B. (2004, September). Review of 'Educational Psychology: A Century of Contributions [A Project of Division 15 (Educational Psychology) of the American Psychological Association]'. Educational Psychology Review, 16(3), pp. 283-298. http://web.a.ebscohost.com.proxy-library.ashford.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=b9e9480c-b2ae-4ebe-90a4-68d30cede448%40sessionmgr4003&vid=6&hid=4107

Weigel, F.K. & Bonica, M. (2014, January 1). An Active Learning Approach to Bloom’s Taxonomy: 2 Games, 2 Classrooms, 2 Methods. U.S. Army Medical Department Journal, p. 21-29. http://web.a.ebscohost.com.proxy-library.ashford.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=5a63ab7a-43c5-47c7-9468-d6139b3423a0%40sessionmgr4003&vid=1&hid=4107

“We must keep searching for ways to ensure that every child learns well. If we do, many of the problems we see in our society that are related to school achievement will be diminished. We can’t solve all the problems of the world, but we can produce a generation of children who are interested in learning, who feel adequate about their learning, and who have better emotional health.”

-Benjamin Bloom

(Brandt, 1979, p. 161)

Image Credit: http://images.betterworldbooks.com/781/Benjamin-S-Bloom-Guskey-Thomas-R-EB9781610486057.jpg

Benjamin Bloom

For Future Use...

Taxonomy and Mastery Learning

Mastery Learning:

The application of this process is pretty straightforward: instruct the unit, assessment one, corrective or enrichment activities, assessment two, next unit, lather, rinse, repeat. However, I would opt for variety in the activities to ensure that students were engaged in the learning. The assessments and the activities are the variables, and would change based on each lesson. A unit on influential psychologists, for example, may include an initial assessment of a short quiz covering each psychologist and his or her contributions to the field, followed by corrective activities like instructional videos on the implications of their contributions today, with a final assessment in the form of a biographical presentation of one or more chosen psychologists.

For younger students, perhaps studying fractions for the first time, the initial assessment would again be a quiz to establish students’ understanding and determine which concepts need reinforced, followed by corrective or enrichment activities based in games which apply the concept to practical situations that are relevant to them, like cutting a pie or distributing toys among friends, and ending with a fun (yet educational) activity like making their own no-bake cookies or homemade play dough in class, which require accurate measurements of ingredients which could easily be doubled or halved to further students’ understanding.

Bloom’s Taxonomy:

I have experience using the cognitive domain of Bloom’s Taxonomy to develop learning objectives, lesson plans, and assessments for students of various ages. For example, a second-grade lesson about the world’s biomes and the animals that inhabited them included identifying each biome (knowledge), matching animals to their biomes in a cut-and-paste activity (comprehension), and organizing biomes by their geographical location (application).

Professors Weigel and Bonica (2014) make another recommendation for taxonomy application, which includes all three domains. They encourage active learning, in which students are involved in the lessons through games and projects rather than enduring lectures and taking copious amounts of notes. Such active learning—like their example of the macroeconomics game “Trade or Raid”—engages students in the cognitive domain in that they use content knowledge, the affective domain in the passion and competition, and the psychomotor domain in the active hands-on experience of manipulating game pieces.

I would seek to employ similar activities in my own classroom—in a high school physics class, for example, roller coasters are an excellent medium for learning about force and gravity; or, in an elementary science classroom, students could plant and tend to their own seeds, documenting each step of the growth process in a journal.

Personal Opinions

Arguments

Bloom’s Taxonomy:

Educator Howard Doughty (2006) offers a variety of criticisms for the use of Bloom’s Taxonomy, from the trouble with taxonomies in general to the obsession with action verbs, but his greatest argument seems to be that the foundations upon which the taxonomy was built now obsolete, that “Bloom created his taxonomy in a particular cultural context and that the social circumstances and political imperatives that gave rise to his ideas no longer exist” (p. 6). He asserts that the world has changed, and these objectives, though revised, have simply not kept pace.

Mastery Learning: It appears to me that the process of mastery learning very closely aligns with the teaching methods and values of the Waldorf school (which is one of two possible directions for the future of my teaching career). Instruction begins slowly in the early grades, and each stage of concept development is thorough, so that lessons build momentum and by the end of eighth grade, students are engaged in college-level work. There is more attachment to the material, and students learn how to learn by going through the process, resulting in much more developed problem-solving and critical thinking skills. I think mastery learning is a much more desirable approach to education than those currently being employed by traditional public schools.

Mastery Learning: Some educators argue against mastery learning, believing that the instructional process would take too much valuable class time, that they would have to sacrifice the amount of material learned for the depth of the lessons. Guskey (2007), however, asserts that timely progress can be made by spending more instructional time in earlier units—the foundations of the future lessons—and gradually less time on subsequent units. When students are better prepared in this way, their progress through the classroom material tends to be more rapid than that of their peers in more traditional learning environments, resulting in their being more academically advanced by the end of the learning period.

Bloom’s Taxonomy:

When used in its proper form—that is, including all three domains rather than focusing solely on the cognitive—I believe that the taxonomy could well serve as a useful tool in teaching and assessing students. Approaching instruction from the various domains and their subdivisions allows for a thorough and well-rounded educational experience. When each of the domains is examined, it becomes clear that the taxonomy in its entirety is a more holistic form of education, serving to educate the whole child—a principle to which I am thoroughly attached.

Mastery Learning Instructional Process

According to Thomas Guskey (2007), Bloom’s development of the mastery learning theory arose from an acknowledgement of problematic achievement gaps among students. Through his observations of student learning, Bloom came to believe that “all students could be helped to reach a high criterion of learning if both the instructional methods and time were varied to better match students’ individual learning needs”, rather than teaching all students with a single method and timeframe (p. 9). In order to achieve this end, Bloom developed the idea of assessments as learning tools, in which teachers first provide feedback to the student by identifying errors, and follow up with more detailed explanations in their corrections.

As he expanded on the use of these assessments in the classroom, a process formed: first, the teacher provides the unit lesson to all students, at the end of which a formative assessment is administered. “Instead of signifying the end of the unit, however, this formative assessment is designed to give students information, or feedback, on their learning. It helps students identify what they have learned well to that point and what they need to learn better” (Guskey, 2007, p. 12). After this assessment, corrective activities are introduced to students based on their individual learning needs, or which concepts need to be reinforced. Once this work is completed, a second formative assessment is given, both to determine the effectiveness of the corrective activities, and to serve as a “second chance” for students’ achievement.

Image Credit: http://mastery-learning.com/glossary.htm

Bloom's Taxonomy

of Learning

Bloom's Domains and their Subdivsions

Early Years and Education

Bloom and his colleagues developed a classification of learning objectives to span three domains: cognitive (thinking/head), affective (feeling/heart), and psychomotor

For those students that perform well on the first assessment, a slightly different path is pursued. Rather than corrective activities, these students are offered enrichment activities to extend their learning, which are “often are self-selected by students and might involve special projects or reports, academic games, or a variety of complex but engaging problem-solving tasks” (Guskey, 2007, p. 13). Before moving on to the next unit, these students are also presented with a second assessment with their peers.

Image Credit: http://gramconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/bloom_taxonomy_2.png

(doing/hands). Each of these domains is further subdivided into levels which the learner must achieve in order to attain some form of mastery. Each of these levels is thoroughly detailed in Bloom’s handbooks, and the domain that is most widely understood and utilized by educators is the cognitive domain.

Born in Lansford, PA in 1913, Benjamin Samuel Bloom was one of five first-generation Americans in his family, after his parents and emigrated from Russia. In 1931, Bloom graduated from high school as class valedictorian, earning a scholarship to Pennsylvania State University. At Penn State, he completed both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in psychology within four years, and “was intermural handball champion” (McKeachie, 2004, p. 291). Bloom spent the next four years as a researcher, until enrolling in a doctoral program at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Ralph Tyler, the head of the university’s Board of Examinations.

Benjamin Bloom giving a presentation at the University of Chicago, 1967

Image Credit:

http://photoarchive.lib.uchicago.edu/db.xqy?show=browse9.xml|997

The subdivisions of the cognitive domain are associated with verbs that are used as assessment directives. For example, in the comprehension level, students are asked to explain, interpret, or paraphrase the material. These verbs can be further manipulated by age group—where a middle school student may be expected to summarize or defend a concept, a second-grader may only match a word to a definition, or to a picture that illustrates the concept.

A thorough and illustrative breakdown of the cognitive domain and assessment verbs

Image Credit: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/24/Blooms_rose.svg/914px-Blooms_rose.svg.png

After earning his doctorate, Bloom succeeded Tyler and retained his seat for the next 17 years, and “it was during this time that he took the lead in developing a taxonomy of educational objectives for the cognitive domain, arguably his most recognized work” (Anderson, 2002, p. 63). Today in education, we commonly refer to this classification of learning objectives and assessment directives as Bloom’s Taxonomy. Another contribution made by Bloom—much less known than his taxonomy—is his theory of Mastery Learning, which encourages variation in instruction in order to accommodate the diverse learning needs of students.

Benjamin Bloom:

Taxonomy and Mastery Learning

Josephine Kmiec

EDU372: Educational Psychology

27 May 2014

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