As an education student, one is likely very familiar with the name and work of Benjamin Bloom. His work soon became known as Bloom’s Taxonomy. Bloom took students’ levels of thinking and broke them into six groups. Along with each category, Bloom addresses words that can be used to accomplish each level.
Bloom’s levels of thinking are divided into the following six groups: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The scale becomes more complicated as you work from knowledge to evaluation.
The most basic level created by Bloom is knowledge. During this phase a student must recall or give learned information. A teacher would ask the student to do some of the following: define, identify, label, state, tell, and spell.
Comprehension is the second basic level of Bloom’s thinking. During this level a student must show proof of understanding a specific concept. To reach comprehension, a teacher would want to use wording such as explain, retell, summarize, and translate.
During the next level, application, a student takes the learned information and sues it in a new setting. This level of thinking would require words such as conclude, apply, show, solve, and give an example of.
The level of thinking after application according to Bloom is analysis. During analysis, a student demonstrates that he or she can compare and see relationships between pieces of information. A teacher would use words such as classify, distinguish, examine, contrast, and categorize.
When a teacher desires a student to think on the synthesis level, a teacher would want to form directions using words like create, plan, predict, formulate, or combine. During this level, a student is able to take pieces of information and put them to together to create a whole idea.
During evaluation a student can take information and use it to make a judgment. When planning an activity on the evaluation level a teacher would want to use words such as choose, compare, decide, select, or judge.
The most common test questions from teachers contain words from the knowledge and comprehension levels.
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