Providing Students with Multiple Assessment Formats

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy and ICT Tools

Many teachers use Bloom's Taxonomy and Bloom's Revised Taxonomy in developing and structuring their teaching & learning experiences. Bloom's Digital taxonomy is an attempt to marry Bloom's revised taxonomy and the key verbs to digital approaches and tools. This is not a replacements to the verbs in the revised taxonomy, rather it suppliments and supports these by including recent developments, processes and tools.

Many of these tools that are FOSS (Free or Open Source Software). Click here for a comparison between Traditional and Digital approaches.

So what is Bloom's Taxonomy?

Benjamin Bloom developed, in 1956, while working at the University of Chicago, a theory on Educational Objectives. He proposed 3 domains or areas:

- Cognitive - person's ability to process and utilize information (thinking), this is what Bloom's Digital Taxonomy is based on;

- Affective - This is the role of feeling and attitudes in the learning/education process;

- Psychomotor - This is manipulative or physical skills.

Bloom's Taxonomy is a taxonomy of activities and behaviours that exemplify Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) and Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS). Bloom's allows use to rank and structure different classroom activities and plan the learning process. In 2001, Lorin Anderson and others revised Bloom's original work, creating Bloom's Revised Taxonomy.

Bloom’s and Revised Bloom's give us a learning process:

- Before you can understand a concept or fact you must remember it;

- To apply a concept you must understand it first;

- To evaluate a process you must have analysed it.Each layer builds on the previous. The creative process naturally incorporates these elements. You must remember (even if you are learning as you go), understand and apply these principles and concepts, analyse and evaluate the success of your design, the process and concept.

However, we don't need to start at lower order skills and then build piecemeal throught the taxonomy towards higher order thinking like creativity. By providing a suitably scaffolded task, the lower order skills of remembering and understanding become inherent in the learning process. By challenging our students to be analytical, evaluative or creative, they will within these processes develop understanding.

Bloom's Original taxonomy		Bloom's revised taxonomy
Evaluation	(HOTS)	Creating
Synthesis		Evaluating
Analysis		Analysing
Application		Applying
Comprehension		Understanding
Knowledge	(LOTS)	Remembering

HOTS is an abbreviation for Higher Order Thinking Skills and LOTS for Lower Order Thinking Skills.

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy. This diagram details Bloom's Revised Taxonomy with some of the original verbs.

Diagram of Bloom's revised Taxonomy showing the flow and process of learning. - A Churches

If you want to learn more about Bloom's Revised/Digital Taxonomy, read here.

Web 2.0 Tutorials

Without a doubt one of the best resources on the web for web2.0 Technologies is the commoncraft show. Lee LeFever's productions are clear, simple and to the point; most of all they are "In Plain English". Here are the links:

• http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter
• http://www.commoncraft.com/photosharing
• http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english
• http://www.commoncraft.com/video-social-networking
• http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english
• http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_show
• http://www.commoncraft.com/blogs
• http://www.commoncraft.com/video-googledocs
• http://www.commoncraft.com/mylocation
• http://www.commoncraft.com/wetpaint

SOURCE: Educational Origami

Critical & Creative Thinking

You are what you think. That's right. Whatever you are doing right now, whatever you feel, whatever you want - all are determined by the quality of your thinking. If your thinking is unrealistic, your thinking will lead to many disappointments. If your thinking is overly pessimistic, it will deny you due recognition of the many things in which you should properly rejoice. For most people, most of their thinking is subconscious, that is, never explicitly put into words. The problem is that when you are not aware of your thinking you have no chance of “correcting” it. When thinking is subconscious, you are in no position to see any problems in it. And, if you don't see any problems in it, you won't be motivated to change it.

When we are thinking of a classroom context, critical thinking is thinking that assesses itself. To the extent that our students need us to tell them how well they are doing, they are not thinking critically. Didactic instruction makes students overly dependent on the teacher. In such instruction, students rarely develop any perceptible intellectual independence and typically have no intellectual standards to assess their thinking with. Instruction that fosters a disciplined, thinking mind, on the other hand, is 180 degrees in the opposite direction.

Each step in the process of thinking critically is tied to a self-reflexive step of self-assessment. As a critical thinker, I do not simply state the problem; I state it and assess it for its clarity. I do not simply gather information; I gather it and check it for its relevance and significance. I do not simply form an interpretation; I check my interpretation to see what it is based on and whether that basis is adequate. 

Because of the importance of self-assessment to critical thinking, it is important to bring it into the structural design of the class and not just leave it to episodic tactics. Virtually every day, for example, students should be giving (to their pairs) and receiving feedback on the quality of their work. They should be regularly using intellectual standards in an explicit way. 

The following wheel shows a procedure sequence that will allow you to engage your students in thinking critically:

Credits: somasimple

The following verb wheel shows a whole set of activities we can get our students to do in class, based on Bloom's Taxonomy:

Credits: critical & creative thinking

Applying Bloom's Taxonomy in the Classroom

Assessing Critical Thinking in Middle and High Schools: Meeting the Common Core, by Rebecca Stobaugh is a practical, very effective resource for middle and high school teachers and curriculum leaders looking to develop the skills necessary to design instructional tasks and assessments that engage students in higher-level critical thinking, as recommended by the Common Core State Standards. This infographic outlines the six steps of Bloom's Taxonomy and provides examples of in-class instruction and assessment at each level.

infographic credits: Eye on Education

 By Eye on Education Blog