How to use Bloom's taxonomy across a school

Why this matters

Curriculum maps say which standards a unit covers, but not what kind of thinking its assignments ask for. To find out whether students analyze and evaluate or only recall, an instructional leader has to collect sample assignments class by class and sort them by hand. By the time that review is done, the unit is over, and its recall-only assignments have already been given.

What Bloom's taxonomy is, and how to use it across a school

Bloom's taxonomy sorts learning objectives by the kind of thinking they ask for. A committee chaired by Benjamin Bloom published the original in 1956, and in 2001 Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl revised it, renaming the levels as verbs (University of Illinois Chicago teaching center). The six levels of the revised taxonomy, from lowest to highest:

• Remember: retrieve relevant knowledge from memory
• Understand: determine the meaning of instructional messages
• Apply: use a procedure in a given situation
• Analyze: break materials into components and determine how they work together
• Evaluate: make judgments based on criteria and standards
• Create: create a new or original work

Krathwohl wrote that sorting curriculum objectives and test items by level is one of the taxonomy's most frequent uses, and that these analyses "almost always" showed "a heavy emphasis on objectives requiring only recognition or recall of information" (Krathwohl, 2002). Norman Webb's Depth of Knowledge (DOK) is a related scale with four levels, written for checking whether standards and test items match (Webb, 2002).

1. Sort the work students actually got by level. Count last month's assignments in each class, not the units on the curriculum map. The share at Remember and Understand shows where to start.
2. Check what students showed, not only what the task asked. A task written at Evaluate can still be answered with recall. Read a few student answers to see which level they reached.
3. Raise one recall assignment a level at a time. Pick an assignment that only asks students to remember, keep its content, and change what students do with it: explain, apply or judge instead of list.

An instructional leader can't read every assignment in every class to do this. Flint sorts each activity into a Bloom's level, and Sparky can read what students did with it.

Sparky shows Ms. Reyes the one recall activity in a science class, and how to raise it

The school, students and staff are made up. Sparky's answers are its real answers about an example class, shortened.

What Flint did for Ms. Reyes

• Flint gave every activity a Bloom's level after it was saved, so Sparky named the Photosynthesis Check-In as the class's only recall activity and listed its four questions.
• Sparky read the submitted sessions on the tree mass activity: three students traced the carbon from the air into the tree, and Henry and James couldn't connect the data to their answers.
• Sparky rewrote the recall questions at the Understand level and kept the same four facts, so students explain the reasoning instead of naming the label.

A leader can't read every activity and every student's session in every class, and Sparky reads all of them.

Oak Hill's Alignment page shows how much of the school's work stops at recall

On the school's Alignment page, Cognitive Rigor (Bloom's) sorts the activities students submitted work on in the date range into the six levels. Pulse flags patterns, such as Remember and Understand making up most of the activities.

Try it with your school for free

In Flint, click Admin, then under Analytics open Alignment to see the school's Cognitive Rigor (Bloom's) chart. For one class, open the class, then Analytics, then the Alignment tab. The speech-bubble button at the top left of either page opens Ask Sparky about your analytics.

Flint is free for up to 80 users, counting students, teachers and administrators. On the free plan the Alignment page shows sample data, so you can see what it looks like before you upgrade. For more on what school leaders see in Flint, read Flint for school leaders.