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Anyone who's gone through a CS course, you know how things like Big O, sorting, and the primary data structures were beat in our heads? Blooms is beat into the heads of Education majors (I was CS/Edu). I live and breathe this now. (BS in CS/Edu, MS in Instructional Design, EdD in Curr & Inst)

This past week was spent writing learning objectives for some cybersecurity lessons we're building and using good, measurable Bloom's verbs (and teaching coworkers who obviously somehow skipped those classes.)

To know if a lesson was effective or not, you should be able to see a change. Like I can't see you understand. I can't see you know how to ___. But I can observe you listing out the things, or I can observe you utilizing a thing, or I can observe you explain how to do the thing. Those are the objectives for a given lesson that is observable. That's the focus of a lesson to get the learner from where they can't do the thing to where they can do the thing and you can know they know it because it's observable in some way.

(Also Benjamin Bloom never drew a pyramid. His books are far more boring and sterile than something as easily digested as a triangle. However the triangle is a good distillation of his work - which is more than one book.)

Any examples of courses with this structure you can share to see it in action? Even a course plan/overview.
Bloom's taxonomy has been standard material for so long, you can assume that most instruction in the USA has been touched by it. You will see it applied to specific concepts. Consider that a common pattern in lectures is to start with review of facts and previous knowledge, apply the knowledge to some standard end, then conclude with more open ended material which requires evaluation or creation.
Here is a critical take on representing this as a hierarchy or a pyramid. Interesting to see that even learning institutions use a pyramid, or as shown in another comment a 3D pyramid.

https://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2020/07/bogus-pyramids...

Excellent piece. Thank you for the recommendation
We use this all the time when creating course learning outcomes. Usually a course features around three such CLOs, with each assignment directed towards at least two of them.

I’m not always sure how effectively CLOs correspond to the reality of what is taught and what is learned in a course, especially in my field (art and design). If they really were so important, then students and lecturers would be far more aware of them than they observably are.

Exactly. As an instructor who has also had to justify his assignments and outcomes using Bloom's, it's fine, but not really much beyond 'make students do new and more complicated things as you go'.

In my experience, Bloom's was more of a bureaucratic tool to justify outcomes rather than reflecting the actual learning in a course. That's an unsolvable problem, though - actual learning is individual and often not directly related to course outcomes, no matter how much a teacher tries to scaffold things.

Bloom's taxonomy is actually pretty useful for what it is meant to do, and it was rather radical at the time: their purpose is to reflect and identify how you are going to evaluate learning. The realisation is that for many topics there are different levels of expertise. You can be decent at writing small programs, but contributing to a large codebase is a whole different skill, and so is writing your own programming language, etc. Bloom's taxonomy helps narrowing the scope of the learning experience to something that is reasonable and realistic. Personally I use it to get students to design their own learning goals, and find it a very useful tool to scope the discussion on what makes a good goal.

Sadly as with many things in Academia, it is misused by management to the point where it's lost its substance. It was never meant to be used for bureaucratic control over overworked lecturers. It's not even useful for that purpose.

Well said. Bureaucracies ultimately serve their own survival and owning a sacred cow of curriculum is one way.

The rate of evolution in academia around learning frameworks has not entirely kept up with the rate of change in society. Changing a sentence in a course can take 1-3 years to approve in too many post secondaries. In that time much of the curriculum in new fields has changed.

Still, nice to see topics like this on HN and learn from other comments in this thread.

If you want to better understand the revised taxonomy, I highly recommend this 3d pyramid visualization prepared by Iowa State:

https://www.celt.iastate.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Revi...

When we look at today’s methods for knowledge models and education, we often look at the “Classical Education” method - named after its origins from classical era Greece as a certain conceptualized approach to education. This method led to a three-stage process, referred to in present-day as “Trivium”, that Ancient Greece philosopher Plato had explained in his dialogues regarding early Greek education. A closer look at the trivium reveals an ontological model that includes the 3 elements of a classical educational regiment - grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

The trivium comes from the study of structures called “Ontology”, meaning different things in different fields (ironically), but through information science, it means, “a way of studying a structure, and understanding the relationships between its parts”. With structure defined as, “the way in which the parts of something are connected together” With this structure being the trivium, and the parts being grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

A more impressive ontological addition towards the trivium has been “Bloom’s Taxonomy”, a hierarchical model written by a committee of educators, chaired by Benjamin Bloom, to take the three elements of the trivium, and divide them each into two simpler elements. “Grammar” turning into “Remember” and “Understand”, “Logic” turning into “Apply” and “Analyze”, and “Rhetoric” turning into “Evaluate” and “Create”.

I'm glad to see they're going with Bloom v2.

For context, in Bloom v1, when he was looking for a word to represent the second layer from the bottom, most people in the working group said "understand", but one person (afaik) said "no, when I say understand, I want them to truly understand, not just that". So we had years and years of education courses based on Bloom v1 teaching you that "Bloom is the thing where you're not allowed to use 'understand'" and whether you put that banned word in your course learning outcomes was the shibboleth for whether you were in the cultured education people's ingroup, or one of those philistines who might be able to get great teaching evaluations and their students report learning stuff, but they don't really understand capital-E Education (Theory).

(I've heard anecdotally that at one uni, everyone just did s/understand/comprehend/ for a while, as if a more fancy word had any influence on what's actually taught in the course.)

Then Bloom himself put "understand" back in there in v2. Some people got a lot of egg on their face.

I'm not sure that "Bloom himself" had much to do with v2. It was published two years after he passed away. Doesn't mean he wasn't somehow involved, but he wasn't listed as an author of the v2. I could be wrong though.

Also schools weren't harping on the layer of the taxonomy named Understand - that's just not a good measurable verb to use in an objective. When choosing a verb, you ask yourself "How will you know they Understand? What will it look like?"

You're right, it seems to be Krathwohl who did most of v2.

Some of the schools I used to work with, very much were harping on "understand" at the time when v2 came out.

While a little old (but still newer than blooms taxonomy outside), Blooms digital taxonomy might be of interest as well:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228381038_Bloom's_D...

Thank you for sharing the link; I wasn’t aware this existed.

Could you explain how the digital taxonomy differs from the Vanderbilt one described above? It would be great to know why it’s important.

Ok, I'll bite. As far as I see it, Bloom's digital taxonomy was an effort to modernize learning taxonomy through a screen instead of a classroom.. except..

It's important to take all taxonomies in context of their origin story, not just this one.

For balanced perspective on digital taxonomies, considering the experience of industry/corporate learning is important - they mostly have fended for themselves, and in doing so I'd say there are as if not more relatable digital taxonomies in industry/corporate training arising from some of the gaps below.

Bloom's is over 50 years old. How we discover, learn, and ultimately master for example by instantly searching online and then trying something out didn't exist then. Being one of the first taxonomies doesn't mean it's best or complete, or the only way. Information (and as a result curriculum) is changing much quicker than it was when Bloom's was created.

I see Bloom's digital taxonomy as an attempt to modernize Bloom's for a snapshot of an anticipated digital age, and to some extent it did set a stage. It was nice for someone like me coming from tech, into EdTech.

Still, Bloom's Digital Taxonomy was created in the early 2000's where digital education largely was early (and to some extent still is) based on a mindset of delivering education from a multimedia DVD with videos. It was early.

I try to remember that there might be limitations which have carried forward by taxonomies that came before the internet was mass adopted, before wifi, or mobile data was that videos and content could only be distributed effectively by DVD/CD. This limiting belief has often codified itself in a lot of downstream taxonomies even when it is no longer relevant, or maybe forgotten.

Yes, some concepts in taxonomies can stand the test of time in some ways - but at some point technologies do so much that they create more capabilities and possibilities that learning taxonomies don't reflect. I think this is why some taxonomies are so generic. Conversely, I think in the real world we see students who can create diy videos in TikTok while traditional learning spins in circles trying to understand itself and grasp the idea that they might be 5-15 years behind. The students are now more digitally literate than the system educating them.

Education believe(d) digital learning technology is putting a camera on a teacher in front a chalkboard and simply recording the classroom. We are not in the 1980's anymore.

At the heart of the digital instructional design relating to academia is while they are looked to as experts, is not a core competency of academia largely based on digital literacy outpacing academics skillsets over the past 10-15 years. Not enough have digital skills or have been supported to have it. There are academic taxonomies instead trying to break down things and tied it back to a traditional curriculum world.

As academic institutions modernize, or not to their demise and natural turn over in the academic workforce, improvements in taxonomies and delivery will happen. The glacial pace of academic progress/deference could be 5-10 years away, and in the meantime people are increasingly comfortable purchasing courses online directly from a subject matter expert who can create their own course.