Tag Archives: Bloom’s Taxomony

Bloom’s Taxomony – Higher Level Thinking Skills

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These six levels start with the simplest and progress to the most complex level of higher level thinking.  As teachers, we need to make sure we cover all six areas. As we teach these, we need to model and think out loud as we demonstrate to the students how to do it. With younger children, we may only work on the first few levels. It’s good to go ahead and model some of the harder levels for those gifted students who might be in your class though.

1.  KNOWLEDGE

  • Recalling of information such as places, dates, and events (who, what, when, where, how)
  • Knowledge of subject matter, main ideas, basic concepts and principles
  • Memorizing

2.  COMPREHENSION

  • Understanding meaning
  • Applying knowledge in a different context
  • Simple comparing and contrasting
  • Making inferences
  • Predicting outcomes
  • Describing in one’s own words
  • Making interpretations
  • Making summarizations

3.  APPLICATION

  • Problem solving
  • Applying what has been learned through exhibits, demonstrations, graphs, charts, etc.
  • Using information, concepts, and methods in different situations
  • Using facts to answer questions such as “How is ___ related to ___?”

4.  ANALYSIS

  • Dividing a whole into its component parts
  • Outlining and diagramming
  • Identifying literary elements and breaking the story down into different parts
  • Distinguishing between inferences and actual facts
  • Analyzing components of an event in history
  • Identifying motives and hidden meanings
  • Separating the components of the scientific process
  • Seeing patterns
  • Teacher asks questions such as “What is the order of steps in ___?”  or “What are the functions of ___?”  or “How does ___ compare/contrast with —?”

5.  SYNTHESIS

  • Using already existing concepts to create new concepts or ideas
  • Creating and designing something new and original.  This could be a short story, poem, music, plan for an experiment, new way of classifying ideas, etc.
  • Combining information from several sources
  • Finding solutions
  • Teacher asks questions such as “How would you create a new ___?”  or “What ideas can you add?”

6.  EVALUATION

  • Comparing ideas
  • Developing opinions and judgments
  • Judging the value of something for a given purpose, based on definite criteria
  • Resolving differences of opinion
  • Making value decisions about issues
  • Teacher asks questions such as “Do you agree?”  or “What do you think is most important?”