Bloom’s Taxonomy Verbs
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Over sixty years ago, Benjamin Bloom chaired the committee of educators responsible for delivering what we all know today as Bloom’s Taxonomy a key foundation for many modern teaching philosophies and learning methodologies. Bloom’s Taxonomy gives a theoretical progression to help classify learning objectives and has been a very useful tool to inform ASI Curriculum and teaching practices.
While this theoretical model is the backbone for many education systems, a number of educators have translated each definition into a set of actionable Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs. The chart visualizes each level of the taxonomy, offering verbs that can be used to explore a wide range of thinking skills and provide hands-on ideas and inspiration for practical classroom and home learning activities.
Using Bloom’s Taxonomy
Bloom’s verbs are quite a helpful tool in your instructional toolbox. Also known and thinking or power verbs, they are a wonderful resource in lesson planning, personalized learning and curriculum mapping.
Teachers may guide students in learning and applying specific thinking skills with the usage of Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs. They simply focus on using verbs that identify with a specific level. For example, the verb list will determine what the student remembers whereas words like judge, argue and assess may direct the student into higher levels of evaluating data and finding their own conclusion.
The idea is to have a solid foundation of knowledge and to build on it. Although Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs are set out in a pyramid format, it’s not always as simple as building the pyramid from bottom to the top. A combination of different thinking levels is often represented in a lesson learned.
The same verbs may be used at various levels. It doesn’t mean the questions will be the same because the same verb is used. These verbs help phrase what the objective the teacher wants to measure. Using the same taxonomy, the outcome of the question and the way the question is phrased will differ for the various thinking categories.
These insightful verbs are measurable and help teachers create questions and assignments that are quantifiable. The verbs help avoid using verbs that don’t lead to measuring and quantifying an outcome.
It may be a learning curve, but when these techniques are used correctly, it becomes a powerful teaching tool. Usage of these verbs aren’t limited to assessing a student’s knowledge and their understanding of a subject; it is a highly effective tool in mapping out a curriculum; in planning the required lessons for the curriculum; and helping students in personalizing and differentiating learning.
Working from the bottom of the pyramid to the top, the 6 levels are knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
Knowledge
A student’s knowledge is assessed by asking questions to see what they’ve remembered from the lesson. Their ability to recall knowledge is tested with multiple choice questions or by asking simply what, where, and how questions.
Verbs examples used to phrase questions to test what the student has previously learned are:
arrange, define, describe, duplicate, identify, label, list, match, memorize, name, order, recognize, relate, recall, repeat, reproduce, and state.
Comprehension
Asking students to summarize, describe or discuss a topic helps determine their level of understanding of the lesson. The student retrieving the knowledge and building new connections in their mind.
Examples of verbs to demonstrate what the student understands are:
classify, convert, defend, describe, discuss, explain, express, generalize, identify, indicate, infer, locate, paraphrase, predict, recognize, report, restate, review, select, and translate.
Application
At this level, students apply what they’ve learned and understood from the lesson by following a process. A great way to test a student’s thinking ability at this level is to require them to apply their understanding to real situations.
Useful application taxonomy verb examples for are:
apply, choose, compute, demonstrate, discover, dramatize, employ, illustrate, interpret, manipulate, operate, practice, prepare, schedule, sketch, solve, use, and write.
Analysis
The analysis level shifts from mere remembering, understanding, and applying knowledge to analyzing a problem. By using these lower level cognitive skills, students break down content and ideas into simpler concept and evidence to support generalizations.
Examples of analyzing verbs teachers may use are:
analyze, appraise, breakdown, calculate, categorize, compare, contrast, criticize, differentiate, discriminate, distinguish, examine, experiment, point out, question, select, separate, and test.
Synthesis
Now students are at a level to predict and theorize about what they’ve learned. They compile information and ideas into new and alternative solutions.
Creative verbs to define these types of questions are:
arrange, assemble, collect, comply, compose, construct, create, design, develop, explain, formulate, manage, organize, plan, prepare, propose, rearrange, rewrite, set up, synthesize, and write.
Evaluate
The highest level of Bloom‘s taxonomy model is to use what they’ve learned, to evaluate, and to apply their knowledge in finding a conclusion based on internal evidence or external criteria.
Evaluating verbs to help phrase “what if” questions are:
appraise, argue, assess, attach, choose, conclude, compare, defend estimate, interpret, judge, predict, relate, rate, core, select, support, and value.
Figure 1: Bloom’s taxonomy staircase (Source: ftp://ftp-fc.sc.egov.usda.gov/NEDC/isd/taxonomy.pdf)
In Figure 1, the stairs represent the cognitive levels in Bloom’s original taxonomy, arranged in ascending order. Above each step is a list of suggested activities for that level. Below each step is a list of the verbs that we commonly used to create learning objectives.
What many people don’t know is that Benjamin Bloom never intended to generate instructional dogma. He actually intended his work for a narrow audience: assessment experts developing new ways to measure what college students learned. But he was glad that it helped make an important shift in educators’ focus from teaching to learning.
In 2001, Lorin Anderson and collaborators published a revised version: A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Anderson was a student of Bloom’s. One of Anderson’s collaborators, David Krathwohl, worked with Bloom on the original taxonomy. Among the reasons for the update was inclusion of new understanding of learning and new methods of instruction.
How the new taxonomy is different
Figure 2 shows the most obvious difference between the original and revised versions. In the revised taxonomy, evaluation is no longer the highest level of the pyramid. A new category, creating, is at the top. Another significant change is that category names are no longer nouns, but verbs, so objectives are meant to describe learners’ thinking processes rather than behaviors.
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Bloom’s Original Taxonomy |
Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy |
Figure 2: Bloom’s original and revised taxonomies
The revised taxonomy arranges skills from most basic to most complex. The new version has two dimensions—knowledge and cognitive processes—and the subcategories within each dimension are more extensive and specific (Figure 3). The report explains how the two-dimensional taxonomy is used to build performance-based objectives. You’ll want to read this part because it will help you build much more targeted objectives.
Figure 3: Taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: a revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives
(Source: Iowa State University Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching; http:// www.celt.iastate.edu/pdfs-docs/teaching/RevisedBloomsHandout.pdf)
In 2007, Andrew Churches updated Bloom’s work again by introducing Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. His intent was to marry Bloom’s cognitive levels to 21st-century digital skills.
For example, for the top of the revised taxonomy, creating, learners might:
- Develop a script for a video
- Construct an eBook
- Develop a podcast
Details support digital literacy
Digital literacy is critical in today’s world, so we don’t use technology just to use it but to develop the skills to live and work successfully. Although we may map a tool to a specific level of the hierarchy, we can certainly use tools at more than one cognitive level. The author, Cecelia Munzenmaier, explains this in more detail in the report.
Bloom’s work continues to inspire attention, revisions, applications, research, and discussion. It shapes instructional practice and is a widely accepted metric. Bloom’s influence has certainly stood the test of time.