Secondary Education and Blooms Taxonomy
Bloom’s model of classifying thinking contains six cognitive levels of complexity. The lowest three levels are: remembering, understanding, and applying. I remember when I was in high school receiving my secondary education, only having a limited amount of assignments that would relate to Bloom’s three highest levels of cognitive development : creating, evaluating, and applying. What comes to mind when I think about the levels of Bloom’s cognitive development that I primarily utilized were : remembering, understanding, and applying. All my learning was generally focused on memorizing facts and taking notes to help me remember those facts. I believe by not being challenged to think about things on a higher level, correlates to why I am unable to recall some of the things that I have learned and studied. The education during this time period was focused on learning what the teacher taught by memorizing your notes, taking a test on that material, and moving on and then never touching upon that content again. This led to meaningless connections and applications of the material I studied. The few projects that were assigned during my secondary education and encouraged higher levels of cognitive complexity I can actually say to this day I can remember fully and with great detail. When exposed to a more complex way of thinking for the purpose of learning and achieving the highest levels of cognitive development allocated me a greater understanding and allowed me to make meaningful connections to the area of study.
Post-Secondary Education and Bloom’s Taxonomy
Through post secondary education I’ve experienced multiple levels of cognitive development. I can remember certain courses that I had taken my freshmen and sophmore years focusing on Bloom’s cognitive levels: applying, understanding, and remembering. As I advanced through college and continued my learning through graduate school, the complexity and expectation of higher cognitive thinking was prevalent and constant. At this level and through various assignments I was able to develop a greater knowledge and think cognitively at the three highest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy: creating, evaluating, and applying. I believe that this relates to my ability to recall a greater amout of what I have learned in college and can apply today. I also believe by scafolding learning and building solid foundations, you can begin to think in greater complexities, building upon previous knowledge by adding new knowledge to your existing knowledge in specific areas. That is what was successfully implemented for me during my post-secondary education.
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I agree that with you that post-secondary education does focus more on using the upper levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. I have to wonder thought, if addressing all levels of Bloom comes from necessity or does the level of technology drive what is now important? Those of us who were raised on the lower levels have become productive citizens and there wasn't as great an emphasis on addressing all the levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. Is that what really drives the learning ability of the students?
ReplyDeleteI like Don's questions on how what is important has changed. I also remember what was taught to me in lower levels Blooms chart, but I think it comes down to the manner in which is is taught. For instance, I can sing you a song of every preposition in the English language, but I could list all the countries in Africa. The song plays to my musical intelligence and to long term repetition and memory.
ReplyDeleteI also think that with the use of technology comes the divergence from the basic tools and information that I still remember from school. Word corrects sentence structure now as well as spelling. There is no need to identify the prepositions, adverbs, adjectives, etc.
In regards to your post-secondary education Kristen, do you think that your retention has anything to do with the fact that you were interested in what you were learning? Do you think you retained as much information in your undergrad math or English class as you did in the classes that were actually in your major?