Using Bloom's Taxonomy
In 1956, Benjamin Bloom and some fellow researchers published a taxonomy of education objectives that has been extremely infl uential in the research and practice of education ever since. Bloom and his colleagues categorized objectives from simple to complex or from factual to conceptual (Slavin, p. 447).
There are six levels in the taxonomy, moving through the lowest order processes to the highest:
Knowledge - The recall of specific information.
Comprehension - An understanding of what was read or explained.
Application - The converting of abstract content to concrete situations.
Analysis - The comparison and contrast of the content to personal experiences.
Synthesis - The organization of thoughts, ideas, and information from the text.
Evaluation - The judgment and evaluation of characters, actions, outcomes, etc. for personal reflection
and understanding.
When questioning students during Active Instruction, questions built around the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy not only help the teacher differentiate questions to meet individual student’s needs, but also stretch the students’ thinking. Teachers can use answers from previous questions to support higher-level questioning, thus supporting students’ abilities to handle more diffi cult questions after building a solid foundation of basic comprehension.
The primary importance of Bloom’s taxonomy is in its reminder that we want students to have many levels of skills. All too often, teachers focus on measurable knowledge and comprehension objectives and forget that students are not considered profi cient in many skills until they can apply or synthesize those skills. On the other side of the coin, some teachers fail to make certain that students are well rooted in the basics before heading off into higher-order objectives (Slavin, p. 449).
Depth of Knowledge
The Depth of Knowledge (DoK) model was created by Norman Webb, a research scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research. The DoK model is centered on the belief that the depth or complexity of knowledge needed to complete a specifi c task should be aligned to standards and assessment.
The DoK model consists of four levels: recall, skills/concepts, strategic thinking, and extended thinking. Each level is used to assess the complexity of standards and assessment items. Each level is a ceiling, not a target that students must master, ultimately allowing them to demonstrate a clearer level of understanding.
Each depth-of-knowledge level is explained below:
Recall and reproduction requires recall of information, such as a fact, defi nition, term, or simple procedure, as well as performance of a simple process or procedure. Level 1 problems involve only one step. A student answering a level 1 item either knows the answer or does not; the answer does not need to be fi gured out or solved.
Skills and concepts/basic reasoning includes the engagement of some mental processing beyond recalling or reproducing a response. The content knowledge or process involved is more complex. These actions imply more than one step. Level 2 activities include making observations and collecting data.
Strategic thinking/complex reasoning requires deep knowledge using reasoning, planning, evidence, and a higher level of thinking than the previous two levels. The cognitive demands at level 3 are complex and abstract. The multistep task requires more demanding reasoning. In most instances, requiring students to explain their thinking is a level 3 task. Other level 3 activities include drawing conclusions from observations; citing evidence and developing a logical argument for concepts; explaining phenomena in terms of concepts; and using concepts to solve nonroutine problems.
Extended thinking/reasoning requires high cognitive demand and is very complex. Students are required to make several connections—relate ideas within the content area or among content areas—and select or devise one approach among many alternatives on how the situation can be solved. Performance assessments and open-ended/constructed response activities requiring signifi cant thought are level 4 tasks.
Unlike Bloom’s, the Depth of Knowledge model is not a taxonomy. It does not rely on verbs alone to define the level of complexity. Rather, it focuses on the depth of understanding needed to complete a given task, thus making it a clearer indicator of mathematical understanding.
