Knowledge and Skill Hierarchies

Early Conceptions of Knowledge and Skills

More than three centuries ago, John Locke described roles of stimuli, experiences, memory, reflection, understanding, synthesis of simpler ideas to produce more complex ones, and mental skills including repetition, combinations, comparisons, building relations, generalizations, and abstractions. A half century later, Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot published a knowledge hierarchy with three domains: (1) understanding, including memory and history; (2) reason, including apprehension, judgment, analysis, and synthesis; and (3) creativity, including imagination as applied in all the arts, including poetry. Later, Johann Herbart characterized logical skills as conceptions, judgments, and reasonings. For knowledge, John Dewey included facts and concrete and abstract concepts; skills included inductive and deductive reasoning, scientific and social inquiry, evaluation, and judgment.

In the 1900s, research by Ivan Pavlov, Edward Thorndike, John Watson, and B. F. Skinner focused on what can be observed and measured. Skinner extended this behaviorist perspective, demonstrating that stimulus-response (S-R) chains with reinforcement of behaviors will shape progressively more complex behaviors. Other research established cognitive associations with behaviors. For example, George Mead described a mental plan of action in response to perception. Edward Tolman showed that learning can occur without reinforcement and concluded that a cognitive map supported learning. Jerome Bruner verified that internal processing influences behaviors.

J. Paul Guilford’s structure of intellect included behavioral and cognitive perspectives in three dimensions: (1) operations (cognition, memory recording and retention, divergent and convergent production, and evaluation), (2) content (figural, symbolic, semantic, and behavioral,) and (3) product (units, classes, relations, systems, transformation, and implications). Reuven Fuerstein also integrated both perspectives, identifying more than 60 cognitive functions, beginning with attention and perception and culminating in problem-solving skills.

In 2001, Lorin Anderson, David Krathwohl, and colleagues reviewed 19 hierarchies, classifying some as unidimensional and others as multidimensional. In 2005, David Mosely and his team reviewed 35 hierarchies: All 35 addressed productive thinking, 33 addressed [Page 432]basic thinking, 29 addressed reflective thinking, 27 addressed knowledge recall, 19 addressed self-engagement, and 13 addressed perception.

Knowledge and Skills Concepts