Harold Bloom

One of Bloom's great talents was having a nose for what is significant. His most important initial work focused on what might be called 'the operationalization of educational objectives'. As I have mentioned, Ralph W. Tyler was his mentor. When Bloom came to Chicago he worked with Tyler in the examiner's office and directed his attention to the development of specifications through which educational objectives could be organized according to their cognitive complexity. If such an organization or hierarchy could be developed, university examiners might have a more reliable procedure for assessing students and the outcomes of educational practice. What resulted from this work is Taxonomy of educational objectives: Handbook 1, the cognitive domain (Bloom et al., 1956), a publication that has been used throughout the world to assist in the preparation of evaluation materials. The cognitive taxonomy is predicated on the idea that cognitive operations can be ordered into six increasingly complex levels. What is taxonomic about the taxonomy is that each subsequent level depends upon the student's ability to perform at the level or levels that precede it. For example, the ability to evaluate--the highest level in the cognitive taxonomy--is predicated on the assumption that for the student to be able to evaluate, he or she would need to have the necessary information, understand the information he or she had, be able to apply it, be able to analyse it, synthesize it and then eventually evaluate it. The taxonomy was no mere classification scheme. It was an effort to hierarchically order cognitive processes.

One of the consequences of the categories in the taxonomy is that they not only serve

as means through which evaluation tasks could be formulated, but also provide a framework for the formulation of the objectives themselves. Bloom was interested in providing a useful practical tool that was congruent with what was understood at that time about the features of the higher mental processes.

The publication of the cognitive taxonomy was followed by the publication of the

affective taxonomy. Bloom's work was a signal contribution to mapping the terrain that

educators were interested in developing. Bloom's contributions to education extended well beyond the taxonomy. He was fundamentally interested in thinking and its development. His work with Broder (Bloom & Broder, 1958) on the study of the thought processes of college students was another innovative and significant effort to get into the heads of students through a process of stimulated recall and think aloud techniques. What Bloom wanted to reveal was what students were thinking about when teachers were teaching, because he recognized that it was what students were experiencing that ultimately mattered. The use of think aloud protocols provided an important basis for gaining insight into the black box.

abilities

can be measured

along a

continuum

from

plain and simple

to

rather complex

Bloom found that over 95 % of the test questions students encounter require them to

think only at the lowest possible level ... the recall of information.

Knowledge of terminology; specific facts; ways and means of dealing with specifics (conventions, trends and sequences, classifications and categories, criteria, methodology); universals and abstractions in a field (principles and generalizations, theories and structures):

Knowledge is (here) defined as the remembering (recalling) of appropriate, previously learned information.

defines; describes; enumerates; identifies; labels; lists; matches; names; reads; records; reproduces; selects; states; views.

Comprehension: Grasping (understanding) the meaning of informational materials.

classifies; cites; converts; describes; discusses; estimates; explains; generalizes; gives examples; makes sense out of; paraphrases; restates (in own words); summarizes; traces; understands.

Application: The use of previously learned information in new and concrete situations to solve problems that have single or best answers.

acts; administers; articulates; assesses; charts; collects; computes; constructs; contributes; controls; determines; develops; discovers; establishes; extends; implements; includes; informs; instructs; operationalizes; participates; predicts; prepares; preserves; produces; projects; provides; relates; reports; shows; solves; teaches; transfers; uses; utilizes.

Analysis: The breaking down of informational materials into their component parts, examining (and trying to understand the