Bloom's Taxonomy

This week’s course focus was developing activities that promote higher-order thinking skills, thus reducing the chances that students can/will plagiarize. Bloom’s Taxonomy was used as a framework for identifying the types of learning encouraged by any particular activity. Bloom’s categories, organized from lower-order to higher-order, are Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation.

For the upper-level, college-bound high school students who I will be teaching in Multicultural Literature, I think that most of the activities should fall in the Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation categories. They are capable of such thinking and, based on my experience teaching this class for the first time last year, they are more motivated when asked to think than to recall, define and identify. Additionally, one of the themes of my class is that people are shaped by both their individual and collective experiences, and I ask students to make connections between themselves and the writers, then between, for example, Hispanic and Hmong writers. Much of what I ask students to understand and appreciate requires them to analyze, synthesize and evaluate.

The Taxonomy activity will help me solidify and make more concrete my direction and learning objectives, and if I use it well, it should assist me in ensuring that I incorporate a wide range of learning categories in my course, but more heavily focus on analysis, synthesis and evaluation.