Anchorage School District

Tip #64: Blooms Taxonomy

Blooms Taxonomy. Higher order
thinking skills. Levels of questions. No
matter what its called, the goal is the same
rigorous thinking. How to we get
beyond a literal level of discussion that
most of our students are satisfied with?
One way is to make sure that students
understand the various levels of thinking.

"Benjamin Bloom (1956) developed a
classification of levels of intellectual
behavior in learning. This taxonomy
contained three overlapping domains: the
cognitive, psychomotor, and affective.
Within the cognitive domain, he identified
six levels: knowledge, comprehension,
application, analysis, synthesis, and
evaluation. These domains and levels are
still useful today as you develop the
critical thinking skills of your students."

The above historical blurb is from
http://eduscapes.com/tap/topic69.htm,
and serves as a reminder of how we can
improve critical thinking skills in our own
classrooms.

The link below offers a color-coded chart
listing the increasing sophistication of
thinking skills, provides a list of verbs to
help construct activities at each level, and
describes a differentiated lesson plan for
writing compound sentences. It is a great
overview if you need to brush up on
Bloom's Taxonomy.

http://cs1.mcm.edu/~awyatt/csc3315/bl
oom.htm

Vocabulary Booklet

Let's start with a graphic organizer. I told
you that I had many uses for the
vocabulary booklet in last week's email tip.
Have students create a 6-flap vocabulary
booklet in order to organize the
information about Bloom's Taxonomy.
Label each flap with a level of thinking in
this order:

recalling information
understanding information
applying information
analyzing information
synthesizing information
evaluating information

Now use the Write Source 2000 handbook
to introduce students to each level of
thinking. Use pp. 283-290. Show your
students how knowing these levels of
thinking can help them on classroom
assignments and assessments. The mini-
unit uses the theme of the California gold
rush to model how different levels of
thinking are used. In each case, a
thorough student writing model is
provided. The first exercise shows a fill-
in-the-blank worksheet (recalling
information) and gets increasingly more
Literacy Tips
Tips for middle school educators on
various topics such as grammar,
writing, reading, spelling, vocabulary,
cooperative learning and more.
Contact: Amy Goodman
Middle School Literacy Support
907-267-0221
goodman_amy@asdk12.org
www.asdk12.org/MiddleLink/LA/


Anchorage School District
Literacy Tips

difficult until students are asked to
evaluate information in the form of an
open-ended paragraph.

Hooked on Thinking

Hooked on Thinking was just published
in the April, 2004 issue of The Reading
Teacher. Ann Paziotopoulos and Marianne
Kroll write about how to make Blooms
Taxonomy more applicable to literature
discussions. In this article, the authors
refer to one of my favorite quotes by
Oliver Wendell Holmes. He uses a
metaphor comparing the intellect of
people to multi-level homes. I have
created a blackline master for you to use
in the classroom that shows this
comparison visually. Holmes says, The
best illumination comes from above,
through the skylight.

Skyscraper Thinking

Pazziotopoulos and Kroll created their
own classroom analogy using a skyscraper
with its feature of ascending floors. The
floors symbolize the effort needed to
reach the next level. The graphic also
conveys an enhanced view or broadened
perspective from the top floor Use
the Skyscraper Thinking sheet as a way to
model higher level questioning with your
students. When discussing Little Red
Riding Hood, ask the students to recall the
facts. What did the wolf do to trick Little
Red Riding Hood? For the evaluation
level, ask students to pretend they are the
wolf and write a short paragraph
defending the wolf's actions.

Then move to more sophisticated
literature from your grade level anthology
to model these levels of thinking. Ask
students to recall such details as what
vexed the narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart?

Have the students compare and contrast
the narrator before and after the police
arrive. Can students think about what
might have happened after the narrator
confessed to murdering the old man at the
end of the story? If students pretended to
be the judge at the murder trial, what
sentence would they give the narrator and
why? The higher students climb the
floors of the skyscraper, the more effort it
takes and the more their views change.
The top floor allows them to acquire a
greater understanding of the literature
because it provides them with sweeping
views helping them to create the big
picture.

Attached is the Skyscraper Thinking
blackline master to use with your students.
I have also provided an example blackline
master copied from the article written by
Paziotopoulos and Kroll that models how
you might also use this as an assessment
tool. The example provided is one from a
health class asking students to
demonstrate their knowledge of the
circulatory system.
There are one-story intellects,
two-story intellects, and
three-story intellects with
skylights. All fact collectors, who
have no aim beyond their facts,
are one-story men. Two-story
men compare, reason, generalize,
using the labors of the fact
collectors as well as their own.
Three-story men idealize,
imagine, predict - their best
illumination comes from above,
through the skylight.
Three-Story Intellects
- Oliver Wendall Holmes
Knowledge (recall facts)
Comprehension (summarize/explain)
Skyscraper
Thinking
Application (relate to real life)
Analysis (compare/contrast)
Evaluation (give an opinion)
Synthesis (create something new)
Source: Paziotopoulos, Ann and Marianne Kroll. Hooked on Thinking. The Reading Teacher. April 2004: 672-677.

Knowledge (recall facts)
Comprehension (summarize/explain)
Skyscraper
Thinking
Application (relate to real life)
Analysis (compare/contrast)
Evaluation (give an opinion)
Synthesis (create something new)
Draw and label the parts of the human heart.
Describe the functions of each part of the heart.
Describe what you do to keep your heart healthy.
Compare and contrast the lifestyles of a person with a healthy
heart versus a person with heart disease.
Describe the journey of a blood cell through the arteries of an
unhealthy heart.
Knowing what you know about a heart-healthy lifestyle,
evaluate a friend or a relative s lifestyle and make recommendations.
Source: Paziotopoulos, Ann and Marianne Kroll. Hooked on Thinking. The Reading Teacher. April 2004: 672-677.