Teacher One: I want my students to really understand the subject.
Teacher Two: I want my students to internalize knowledge and grasp the core or the essence of what I am teaching.
Teacher Three: I want to help my students realize their full potential as individuals.

Do they all mean the same thing? Specifically what does a student do who “really understands” which he does not do when he does not understand.

Taxonomy: “ Classification, esp. of animals and plants according to their natural relationships…”

In the mid 1950’s, a team led by Benjamin S. Bloom of the University of Chicago bravely decided to settle the matter once and for all. Bloom felt that one of the major difficulties confronting anyone interested in education was the definition of goals. To address this issue, Bloom and his team developed the now famous taxonomy of educational objectives that classifies educational objectives and relates each objective to specific classroom procedures.

Initiated as a support for cognitive assessment, the Taxonomy was to prove extremely valuable in the specification and analysis of instructional outcomes and the design of instruction to attain them. The Taxonomy helped teachers, administrators and instructional experts discuss instructional issues with greater precision facilitating the exchange of information about curricular development and evaluation devices.

Bloom was among the first to accept the notion that humans’ learned capabilities comprise three major domains: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor.

In the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I, he outlined a taxonomy of learning outcomes in the Cognitive domain. In its most general form the six levels of cognitive outcomes are:

 1.0 Knowledge
 2.0 Comprehension
 3.0 Application
 4.0 Analysis
 5.0 Synthesis
 6.0 Evaluation

In the next section we will discuss each level of his system by defining its content, briefly discussing its associated assessment procedures.

Sources
1. Driscoll, Psychology of Learning for Instruction, 1994