 For most people in education, Bloom's taxonomy is just something that we all develop an understanding of. The history of it is, to my understanding, is that Bloom and his associates went back in the late 50s, went into classrooms across the United States looking at what actually does happen in classrooms in terms of what is the level of teaching, what is the level of assessment. And I think one of the things that they walked away with is the belief that there was an overwhelming amount of time and effort being focused on what amounted to knowledge, factual teaching and assessment. So teachers taught facts and students essentially gave those facts back to the teacher. So the whole idea was to alert actually teachers and students to the possibility that there were deeper forms of learning. And so the taxonomy was to develop to demonstrate to teachers the various levels of cognitive engagement a learner could have. One of the things that's particularly useful about Bloom's taxonomy is not just that, you know, there's this idea that there are these three different domains of learning and so you've got the cognitive domain which is really about intellectual skills and capabilities. There's the psychomotor domain which is really about physical kinds of skills, and there's often the example that's given as driving in a teaching and learning setting in educational institutions. Lab work is a really great place for students to develop psychomotor skills. And then there's the affective domain which is really all about the values and attitudes that you want people to develop. Within each of those there are these kinds of levels or, you know, I hate calling it a hierarchy because all the levels are really important, but what's useful about that is figuring out that there are certain things that build on each other. And so, you know, students have to remember certain terminology before they can understand it and they need to understand it before they can apply it. And so this is how the levels kind of build on each other. Most of the time, especially in higher education, people are, it's easy to focus right in on the cognitive domain, but it's surprising how many courses or how many learning experiences involve some of the other domains as well. So that's kind of the first area that Bloom's taxonomy can be really helpful to look at just to maybe think about the scope of the learning outcomes that you want to consider for your course. Bloom is huge in terms of whole person learning. So you've got perceptual motor or psychomotor, behavioral, cognitive, affective. And we've got varying levels of grasp inside all of those. So, of course, I think a well-designed course takes up all of those dimensions of the learning, the cognitive dimension, the doing or the active behavioral dimension, and the affective dimension. I'm not necessarily sure that we can assess all those dimensions or need to assess all those dimensions all the time, but certainly they need to be a part of learning if it's going to be deep learning, as opposed to sort of just collisions with subject matter. In terms of how we associate or relate Bloom's taxonomy to an outcomes-based program of learning, we would ensure that we are making clear what level of competence, what level of thinking our learning outcomes are supposed to be helping our students to demonstrate. So we would make sure that we have appropriate learning outcomes for every level of that taxonomy, and not only appropriate outcomes, but also the other aspects of say course design we would have make sure that we have the right kinds of assessment for every level, the right kinds of learning activities for every level. Within each of these levels you have these action words that you can use that indicate to students the kinds of skills that they're developing and the kinds of actions that they have to take. And so in that way it's not just a useful way of communicating to students, it's also a really useful way to then design your assessments and the kinds of teaching and learning activities that you're doing. Bloom's taxonomy provides that fundamental link of alignment between what are the outcomes we expect and how are we assessing something. When we're talking to instructors we'll show them Bloom's taxonomy or Fink's hierarchy as well. Mainly to give them some words to use because often when they're writing a learning objective for the course or thinking about a learning outcome for their students for a course they'll very much want to think about or talk about what the students need to understand or know and then we say, well how do you know that they know this? So it's important for them to have access to the words that are in Bloom's taxonomy because it can help them identify how they're actually going to assess those objectives or learning outcomes. I think Bloom's taxonomy is very good in terms of creating multiple choice questions and thinking about how you can ask questions that tap knowledge or content at a much deeper level. But there's a lot of verbs in the Bloom's taxonomy too and sometimes I see people kind of stop at the multiple choice and what I really like about learning outcomes is that they specify a lot of the skills we want our students to learn skills over and above knowledge. Bloom's taxonomy, it's a hierarchy and so it has things at the bottom, it has things at the top and it doesn't mean that one is more important than the other it just means that for you to do some of the things at the very top level like create or value or these sorts of things it requires that you have these prerequisite skills and the only way that you can get them is by kind of marching your way up the hierarchy. So often you'll see the Bloom's triangle and people are like, oh we have to be working up at the top of the triangle but they're all connected so it's really important to not just stay obviously at the lower level but you want to be able to see how they connect across the spectrum and so we're trying to incorporate that into many of the assessments so sometimes we will have just a multiple choice test that hopefully is making sure that they're reading the material and that they're answering the questions and I think that has its place but it also, we want to make sure that we have other measures of checking understanding and how they can apply that into new contexts. Having words like identify or articulate or discuss or list or make connections between those things are a little bit easier to make that connection to alright I have this particular outcome, this is how I'm expressing it now how am I going to assess it? A lot of how I organize my course involves them doing things in between posts or encounters with me that are actually concrete doing, not just thinking about doing things so I like to build in all three I think it makes for a multimodal learner certainly it gets visual auditory kinesthetic tactile