Domains of learning

Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy

Bloom created a learning taxonomy in 1956.  During the 1990's, a former student of Bloom's, Lorin Anderson, updated the taxonomy, hoping to add relevance for 21st century students and teachers. This new expanded taxonomy can help instructional designers and teachers to write and revise learning outcomes.

 

Bloom's six major categories were changed from noun to verb forms.

The new terms are defined as:

Remembering	Retrieving, recognizing, and recalling relevant knowledge from long-term memory.
Understanding	Constructing meaning from oral, written, and graphic messages through interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing, and explaining.
Applying	Carrying out or using a procedure through executing, or implementing.
Analyzing	Breaking material into constituent parts, determining how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose through differentiating, organizing, and attributing.
Evaluating	Making judgments based on criteria and standards through checking and critiquing.
Creating	Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure through generating, planning, or producing.

Because the purpose of writing learning outcomes is to define what the instructor wants the student to do with the content, using learning outcomes will help students to better understand the purpose of each activity by clarifying the student’s activity. Verbs such as "know", "appreciate", "internalizing", and "valuing" do not define an explicit performance to be carried out by the learner. (Mager, 1997)

Unclear Outcomes	Revised Outcomes
Students will know described cases of mental disorders.	Students will be able to review a set of facts and will be able to classify the appropriate type of mental disorder.
Students will understand the relevant and irrelevant numbers in a mathematical word problem.	Students will distinguish between relevant and irrelevant numbers in a mathematical word problem.
Students will know the best way to solve the word problem.	Students will judge which of the two methods is the best way to solve the word problem.