Taxonomies of objecTives and learning

An objective can be defined as a statement of what educators intend students to learn as a result of the educational experiences in which educators engage students. Because objectives are statements, they take on a common form, namely, subject-verb-object. The subject is the learner or, more generally, the student. The object indicates the content to be learned. The verb indicates how the student is expected to process the content. Using this form, one objective might be, “The student will learn to classify poems.” In this example, the content is poems; the process is classify. The phrase “will learn to” is simply a reminder that intentions are involved, which, one hopes, will be actualized at some time in the future. Learners can learn to classify content other than poems. They can learn to classify animals, works of art, and numbers.

Benjamin S. Bloom was one of the first educators to realize the universality of a finite number of verbs across a variety of subject matters. Somewhat unfortunately, but understandable in the context of the times, he referred to these verbs as “student behaviors.” What came to be known as Bloom's Taxonomy was, in fact, a classification of these universal behaviors.

Since the publication of Bloom's Taxonomy in 1956, at least 19 alternate frameworks for classifying educational objectives have been developed. Eleven of these frameworks included a single dimension, as did Bloom's Taxonomy. The other frameworks contained multiple dimensions, ranging from two through five. In November 1995, a group of eight cognitive psychologists, curriculum theorists, and instructional researchers, and testing and assessment specialists met in Syracuse, New York, to consider a major revision of Bloom's Taxonomy. Deciding that a revision was both necessary and feasible, they worked over the next 5 years to prepare a volume that was published in 2001.

The Revised Bloom's Taxonomy (RBT) contains two dimensions. The cognitive process dimension represents the verbs included in objectives. The cognitive process categories were derived from the six categories of Bloom's Taxonomy: remember (replacing knowledge), understand (replacing comprehension), apply, analyze, evaluate (moved one position lower on the continuum), and create (replacing synthesis and moved one position higher). The knowledge dimension represents the objects of objectives. This dimension includes four generic types of knowledge that transcend specific subject matters: (1) factual knowledge, (2) conceptual knowledge, (3) procedural knowledge, and (4) metacognitive knowledge. Within the framework of the RBT, the objective mentioned earlier, “The student will learn to classify poems,” is of the form “The student will understand (which includes classify as a specific process) conceptual knowledge (because we're interested in types of poetry rather specific poems).”

Using the RBT to examine objectives provides curriculum developers with a more complete understanding of specific objectives. Too often, the focus is on the content only. Teachers teach novels, fractions, mammals, conquests, Impressionism, jazz, and lacrosse. Increasingly, however, curriculum developers and educators have come to understand that learning involves more than simply encountering perhaps memorizingcontent. Learning involves interacting with and acting on the content in various ways. These “ways of acting” are represented in the RBT by the verbs included on the cognitive process dimension. Students can learn to remember the authors of specific novels. They also may learn to interpret the actions of characters within the novels or explain the impact of the setting on the tone of a novel. Eventually, they may learn to evaluate the quality of specific novels and, perhaps, create a novel of their own. These are only five of the myriad of objectives that can be built around the study of the novel. They differ not in the content, but in the cognitive processes required of the student.

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