Bloom’s Taxonomy
Bloom's Taxonomy
What is Bloom’s Taxonomy?
- Remember → Understand → Apply → Analyze → Evaluate → Create
- The ladder of cognitive levels for learning objectives
- Set objectives at higher levels
Used well, Bloom changes not the whole curriculum but one line in the course plan: the “learning objectives” field. The moment you change “understand X” to “be able to distinguish X,” decisions on lecture time, hands-on practice, and assessment tools follow. The objective verb is the first decision in the design, and if the verb is vague, every decision after it falls to the instructor’s discretion. So this framework is less a technique for building good lectures than a way for planners to put in writing the level they expect from the instructor.
What practitioners often miss is that the revised edition did not add only six “cognitive process” levels; it is a two-dimensional table that adds a knowledge dimension. Crossing the four knowledge types (factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive) with the six levels gives 24 cells, and even the same “apply” calls for completely different teaching methods depending on whether it applies procedural knowledge (filling in a form as instructed) or conceptual knowledge (transferring a principle to a new situation). Design is not done until you pick the cell. For courses of 4 hours or less, we group objectives into 3–4 and cap the highest level at “apply” or “analyze”.
People also often confuse it with Kirkpatrick. Bloom is a design language used before training to decide “what, and to what depth.” Kirkpatrick is an evaluation language used after training to check reaction, learning, behavior, and results. The two only pay off when used together. If you set the objective at “analyze,” the Level 2 learning assessment should be a case-judgment task, not a multiple-choice quiz. When the objective level and the assessment tool do not match, you end up with a course that scores high on satisfaction while work on the job stays the same. Sketch the assessment first and you will quickly see whether that objective is overreaching.
The most common misconception is that you must climb the six levels in order, from the bottom up. The authors of the revised edition also saw the hierarchy as loose, and in practice, starting with a creation task and then pulling in the remembering and understanding it requires often works faster. 'Higher is better' is a misconception too. For mandatory safety and compliance training, stopping at remember and understand is the right call, and adding 'create' just means people who need to memorize the right answers end up only discussing. The riskiest case is writing 'create' in the plan and then closing with a 25-question quiz. The moment the document and reality diverge, next year’s plan slides back to 'understand'.
Anna ChoExpert in organizational culture, coaching, emotion management, and CS consulting
John KimInstructor John Kim, CEO of Nanum Consulting and author of B2B Marketing DesignA taxonomy of educational objectives published in 1956 by American educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom and colleagues. In 2001, Anderson and colleagues revised it, replacing “evaluate” with “create” as the top level.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A, a food manufacturer (480 employees, KRW 120 billion (≈ US$89,780,000) in annual revenue), had received a 4.5 satisfaction score for its new team leader course for three years running. Yet the production division kept saying, 'Nothing changes after they come back from training.' They kept the 4-hour course structure as it was and decided to rewrite the objectives first.
- When Manager Kim on the training planning team opened last year’s plan, 6 of the 8 learning objectives ended with 'understand ...', and the only assessment was a single 25-question multiple-choice quiz.
- In a field interview, the head of production said, "Our team leaders know all the concepts, but they read a defect report and still can’t pinpoint the cause." That remark became the basis for redesigning the objectives.
- Manager Kim cut the 8 objectives to 4, raised 2 of them to the analysis level, and rewrote one as 'Can distinguish process causes from material causes in defect data'.
- With the new objectives, the lecture portion of the 4-hour course shrank to 90 minutes, a 150-minute case exercise was added in which participants separate causes across 3 real defect reports, and the in-house instructor was replaced by Deputy General Manager Park, who came up from the production line.
- Three months later, 27 of the 32 team leaders submitted reports with the cause-classification field filled in (11 the previous quarter), and recurring defects fell from 18 to 11 per month on average.