Bloom's Taxonomy

All right, we're talking Education Theory now.

So, why should you know about Education Theory (especially if you're not studying Education)? Because knowing what you're lecturers/tutors/teachers are thinking about/looking for can help you research and right a better assignment.

Take Bloom's Taxonomy, for example. Most teachers and lecturers know of this list, and most have it in the back of their minds when they're marking your work. The marks you will get will obviously depend on where in the list your work sits.

So what is Bloom's Taxonomy?

It's a list of intellectual processes in order of how much thought is required for each, and it looks like this:

• Knowledge


• Comprehension (Understanding)


• Application (Use)


• Analysis


• Synthesis (Creation)


• Evaluation.

Knowledge (basically, the ability to spout facts and figures), Comprehension and Application are at the "bottom" of the list and are known as the "lower order" skills. Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation are the "higher order" skills - they show that you can actually think about the information you know, use those thoughts to form ideas and theories and evaluate what you still need to know/think about in order to improve your ideas and theories.

To get the top marks, you need to be able to show all six of these cognitive skills.

For example, if you were writing an essay on the Boer War, you would need to show that you knew the details, then you would need to show that you understood those details and could use them in proper context (say, by connecting information gathered from different sources to discuss things that were happening at the same time). Then you would have to show that you have thought about this information, that you have a theory that you can prove by using this information and that you have the ability to established whether or not the theory has been adequately proven or if it needs more work.

This is why it's important to look at how you handle your quotes in an assignment. I always tell my students that they can't just let a quote stand on its own - they have to comment about it - explain why it was important enough to quote it. This is how you show your higher order skills.

Whenever you quote or paraphrase from another source, you have to add your own thoughts to it. Show how you are analysing the information and using it to prove your argument.

Oh, and always have an argument. Even if you think you're just writing a report and you only have to "tell it like it is", you should still have an argument that you can prove with your information - a central idea that pulls everything together and makes you think about why the information is important in the first place.