Measurable-Verbs Blooms Taxonomy Chart.pdf
Bloom's Taxonomy
As you start to shape your learning outcomes for your course, many teachers and course designers find it very useful to use Bloom's Taxonomy as a guide. Benjamin Bloom was an educational psychologist who helped develop a classification scheme for learning objectives that reflects how to show mastery in different skills, knowledge areas, and abilities.
The result—Bloom's Taxonomy—is a series of six different categories of skills, which ascend from the most basic types to the most complex ones.
There are six levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, which ascend from the lowest to the highest cognitive skills as follows:
- Knowledge/remembering
- Comprehension/understanding
- Application/applying
- Analysis/analyzing
- Evaluation/evaluating
- Synthesis/creating
You can use Bloom's Taxonomy to create your learning outcomes using verbs that describe student learning (See the charts below or download the attached PDF). Bloom's Taxonomy can help you take a building block approach to teaching and learning by starting with the least complex cognitive skill category (Knowledge/remembering) and then moving up through the levels so that by the end of the course, your students are able to synthesize and create the information.
After you have created the six or seven learning outcomes for your course, keep in mind that you're aiming for outcomes at a variety of different levels. Then, you will need to assemble them in ascending order of complexity. Doing so will help you organize the way you present the material and select your resources and Moodle activities. It will also create scaffolding in which your students use the material they've just learned to ascend to the next level.
