🇸🇬EdTech Blog: Considerations for tech-enabled teaching and learning

Most educators would probably have heard of the Bloom's Taxonomy.

"In 1956, Benjamin Bloom with collaborators Max Englehart, Edward Furst, Walter Hill, and David Krathwohl published a framework for categorizing educational goals: Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Familiarly known as Bloom’s Taxonomy, this framework has been applied by generations of K-12 teachers and college instructors in their teaching.

The framework elaborated by Bloom and his collaborators consisted of six major categories: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. The categories after Knowledge were presented as “skills and abilities,” with the understanding that knowledge was the necessary precondition for putting these skills and abilities into practice.

While each category contained subcategories, all lying along a continuum from simple to complex and concrete to abstract, the taxonomy is popularly remembered according to the six main categories."

Armstrong, P. (2010). Bloom’s Taxonomy. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/.

older version

newer version

In 2001, the taxonomy was revised to the version many are more familiar with today from Remember to Create.

"A group of cognitive psychologists, curriculum theorists and instructional researchers, and testing and assessment specialists published in 2001 a revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy with the title A Taxonomy for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment. This title draws attention away from the somewhat static notion of “educational objectives” (in Bloom’s original title) and points to a more dynamic conception of classification.

The authors of the revised taxonomy underscore this dynamism, using verbs and gerunds to label their categories and subcategories (rather than the nouns of the original taxonomy). "

It is important to note that knowledge is at the basis of these six cognitive processes, but its authors created a separate taxonomy of the types of knowledge used in cognition:

Factual Knowledge

Knowledge of terminology
Knowledge of specific details and elements

Conceptual Knowledge

Knowledge of classifications and categories
Knowledge of principles and generalizations
Knowledge of theories, models, and structures

Procedural Knowledge

Knowledge of subject-specific skills and algorithms
Knowledge of subject-specific techniques and methods
Knowledge of criteria for determining when to use appropriate procedures

Metacognitive Knowledge

Strategic Knowledge
Knowledge about cognitive tasks, including appropriate contextual and conditional knowledge
Self-knowledge

In my recent explorations of concepts and frameworks to group learning activities for Home-Based Learning, I encountered an infographic featuring Bloom's Digital Taxonomy (from Arizona State University's site) and I found it pretty helpful.

Infographic Credit: Ron Carranza
from Future Focused Learning

Separately, I also recently learnt about PIC-RAT which helps with Technology Integration Evaluation. PIC-RAT is a recently developed technology integration model whose framework assumes that there are two foundational questions that a teacher must ask about any technology use in their classrooms.

What is the students’ relationship to the technology used? (PIC: Passive, Interactive, Creative)
How is the teacher’s use of technology influencing traditional practice? (RAT: Replace, Amplify, Transform; cf. Hughes, Thomas, & Scharber, 2006)

I have not had the chance to really apply it in the classroom lesson planning context but I can imagine that it would be useful to ensure that students are truly engaged with the use of technology for learning and not just use it for the sake of using it.