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Lesson Planning: At the Intersection of Bloom’s Taxonomy and Knowledge Dimensions

Revisiting Bloom’s Taxonomy

In the 1950’s Benjamin Bloom and other researchers collaborated to create what is known as Bloom’s Taxonomy of cognitive processes. This has been revised over the years and includes today six cognitive dimensions:

  • Remember: recall facts and basic concepts (e.g., define, list, state)
  • Understand: explain ideas or concepts (e.g., describe, explain, summarize)
  • Apply: use information in new situations (e.g., solve, complete, change)
  • Analyze: draw connections among ideas (e.g., contrast, categorize, connect)
  • Evaluate: justify a stand or decision (e.g., criticize, defend, prioritize)
  • Create: produce new or original work (e.g., design, modify, write)

The accompanying verbs can be used to develop and organize learning goals and objectives for our curricula, courses, and daily lesson plans. Many UP faculty already use Bloom’s Taxonomy as a guide for planning, but we can enhance the use of Bloom’s Taxonomy by considering our objectives through the lens of knowledge dimensions that Anderson and Krathwohl added to the taxonomy in 2001. The four dimensions are:

  • Factual knowledge (basic elements to learn in the discipline)
  • Conceptual knowledge (interrelationships between basic elements within a larger context)
  • Procedural knowledge (methods in the discipline)
  • Metacognitive knowledge (awareness of how learning work in relation to one’s self)

Anderson and Krathwohl developed a matrix for combining cognitive processes and knowledge dimensions that can be adapted when planning courses and lessons. As faculty, we can adapt this matrix in our own lesson planning. Here’s an example from a 300-level applied linguistics course that I teach in the Department of International Languages and Cultures.

Basic concept: Individual differences in language learning

Knowledge Dimension: Factual knowledge

Bloom’s Taxonomy Cognitive Process: Remember (Related actions verbs: define, list, state, recall, identify)

Learning Goal: Students can accurately define individual differences and list examples.Writing assistance working with student

Assessment: Students take a low-stakes quiz in which they define individual differences and provide examples they recall from the reading and group work activity.

Learning Experiences: 

  1. Students read section on individual differences in How Languages are Learned respond to reading prompts before class.
  2. In class, students work in groups to identify individual differences in written profiles of learners and present their findings.

Intersecting with multiple knowledge dimensions

As faculty, we can also run concepts and theories we teach through both multiple knowledge and cognitive process dimensions as we plan instruction. Let’s take, for example, the social cultural theoretical perspective of second language acquisition from the same applied linguistics course

Factual dimension / Remember

Instructor provides learning experiences so that students practice recalling definitions of terms and characteristics and elements of the theory.

Conceptual dimension / Understand

Students participate in learning experiences that guide them to start explaining principles and models of the social cultural perspective. It’s important to note that at this level, the students are not just restating an author’s or instructor’s explanation; that would be remembering. Rather, they are using concepts, terms, and paraphrasing to explain the concept or theory.

Procedural dimension / Analyze

Eventually, students point out passages in a research text that indicate the linguistics researcher is writing from the social cultural perspective of second language learning. They are using their knowledge of the theory as an analytical tool.

Metacognitive dimension / Apply

Finally, the instructor can work with students to develop and apply motivational and language learning strategies that are based on a social cultural perspective of second language learning.

The above processes can also be reorganized into a class lesson planning tool.

Application in your teaching

The combination of Bloom’s Taxonomy and knowledge dimensions create a powerful approach for your faculty toolbox in support of our efforts to provide the excellent undergraduate education opportunities to our students. For more about deploying Bloom’s Taxonomy and the four dimensions of knowledge, check out Laurie Richlin’s Blueprint for Learning: Construction College Courses to Facilitate, Assess, and Document Learning (2006), one of the sources of today’s TLC blog entry. If you would like to explore in more detail using dimensions and Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs in a lesson planning form, download this MS Word version.

Jeffrey White directs the Learning Commons in the Shepard Academic Resource Center in Buckley Center 163, where he trains tutors to reach Level 1 of the International Tutor Training Program Certification. He also teaches German, an applied linguistics course, and a preparation course for study abroad in the Department of International Languages and Cultures. Jeffrey is currently the president-elect of the Northwest College Reading and Learning Association. He is happy to meet over coffee or lunch to discuss course and lesson design, training, and teaching in higher education and can be reached at white@up.edu.

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Sticky Skills

Recently, UP’s College of Arts & Sciences held its annual book-club reading of a work on pedagogy. This year’s title was Make it Stick: the Science of Successful Learning (P. Brown/H. Roediger/M. McDaniel, 2014), and Jeffrey White led faculty in a discussion.

If you were among the participants, did the book’s methods “to learn better and remember longer” actually stick?

Whether you are new to the book or not, here’s a quick overview of a few of its lessons for the classroom.

Make it Stick was published the same year (2014) as Benedict Carey’s How We Learn. It contains similarly counterintuitive lessons that were derived from research in the cognitive psychology of learning (my two-page overview of that book can be found here).

The book’s epigraph comes from Aeschylus: “Memory is the mother of all wisdom.” Make it Stick insists that human learning primarily originates not through new information but through remembering what you have already encountered. (For so often, it takes this kind of reflection to recognize – often for the first time – the value your experiences hold.)

The authors point to data showing how our classic learning strategies of cramming, underlining, highlighting, and repetition simply do not have long-term value for remembering.

They would have us replace these ineffective methods with tools that actually work: ones that are more effective in disrupting the natural process of forgetting. So, for our purposes of teaching at UP here are six challenges drawn from the book:

How might you integrate “interleaving” into your curriculum? As the book explains interleaving involves practicing different topics or skills in a series – rather than focusing long and hard on just one. Learning at different times, in different spaces, and with different subjects helps multiply “retrieval cues,” fostering better access to our memories.

How might you integrate forgetting into your curriculum? Students should remember to forget in order to exercise the muscles of retrieval. Make it Stick suggests we honor the fact that “learning is an iterative process that requires you to revisit what you have learned earlier and continually update it and connect it with new knowledge” (21-2). While “the amount of study time is no measure of mastery” (10), a more dependable criterion for mastery involves the number of times you forget and then remember a topic or skill. Time and interleaving can foster the crucial practice of forgetting. (They suggest, for example, deliberately employing days between classes to forget, so that we then start our classes by having students try to remember what was covered in the last meeting.)

How might you add more quizzes to your course? The book champions an increased number of low-stakes quizzes across the semester, to help foster the practice of self-quizzing. This simple activity gives students a more accurate understanding of how much they know and don’t know (for overconfidence in what one knows is all too common). And it helps interrupt forgetting.

How might you integrate the habit of “writing to learn” into your course? A regular habit of low-stakes, informal writing in your class (journal entries, freewrites, targeted reflections) provides cognitive variety in a lecture-based class, and fosters personal connections necessary to unite students with new concepts. By thinking on paper, students are practicing “retrieval, elaboration, and generation” – internal activities that no lecture can provide.

How might you integrate the “concrete and personal” into your curriculum? We remember things best when they matter to us. Make it Stick urges that instructors not be shy about weaving personal anecdotes into the content of their lessons: “Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal” (11). While it might seem self-indulgent to bring yourself into the picture, serving as a model to students of how to integrate a subject into our everyday lives helps clarify the stakes involved.

How might you make learning more difficult in your class? This wildly counterintuitive strategy suggests we stop streamlining our curriculum for ease – for the best, most long-lasting learning happens when the learning is hard. Students do better when we give them the room to struggle with difficulty. Forms of such “desirable difficulty” include adding to your class more puzzles, problems, and riddles than you currently do: “It’s better to solve a problem than to memorize a solution” (88). So if we truly want to learn (and remember) a concept, we should turn off that pleasurable TED talk, and reach instead for the textbook.

(In other words, stop reading featherweight, short-form reviews like this one, and crack open Make it Stick!)

-Lars Erik Larson, UP English Dept, 2018

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Providing the opportunity to forget…and remember

a close up of an elephants faceOver this past summer, a couple books that focus on the role of recall in learning came to my attention. Make it stick (Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel (2014)) and Small Teaching by James Lang (2016) both claim that retrieval practice is essential for durable learning. The authors argue that practicing recall builds strong connections in the brain that lead to long-term retention, and they cite numerous studies to support their claims. Our students can often struggle with recalling material from their readings, our lectures, and classroom discussions, but we can take steps to promote recall by making small changes to our teaching. For example, we can open class sessions by asking students to remind everyone what we did in the last session or last week. Having students do this in pairs or small groups and then report out may help to them to overcome some inhibitions or recalling in a whole-group discussion. When introducing something new, Lang suggests having students retrieve previous related material or concepts that lead up to it. By providing students the opportunity to recall at the beginning of class, we help to prime the pump for learning and better participation. These are just a couple of the many suggestions and examples of how we can support our students’ learning and improve our approaches to teaching in higher education.