Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Domains
The cognitive domain involves knowledge and the development of intellectual skills (Bloom, 1956). This includes the recall or recognition of specific facts, procedural patterns, and concepts that serve in the development of intellectual abilities and skills. There are six major categories of cognitive an processes, starting from the simplest to the most complex (see the table below for an in-depth coverage of each category):
- Knowledge
- Comprehension
- Application
- Analysis
- Synthesis
- Evaluation
The categories can be thought of as degrees of difficulties. That is, the first ones must normally be mastered before the next one can take place.
Bloom's Revised Taxonomy
Lorin Anderson, a former student of Bloom, and David Krathwohl revisited the cognitive domain in the mid-nineties and made some changes, with perhaps the three most prominent ones being (Anderson, Krathwohl, Airasian, Cruikshank, Mayer, Pintrich, Raths, Wittrock, 2000):
- changing the names in the six categories from noun to verb forms
- rearranging them as shown in the chart below
- creating a processes and levels of knowledge matrix
http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html
