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Introduction and Background:

Bloom's Taxonomy

In the 1950's Benjamin Bloom developed his taxonomy of cognitive objectives, Bloom's Taxonomy. This categorized and ordered thinking skills and objectives. His taxonomy follows the thinking process. You can not understand a concept if you do not first remember it, similarly you can not apply knowledge and concepts if you do not understand them. It is a continuum from Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) to Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS). Bloom labels each category with a gerund.

Bloom's Revised Taxonomy

In the 1990's, a former student of Bloom, Lorin Anderson, revised Bloom's Taxonomy and published this- Bloom's Revised Taxonomy in 2001.Key to this is the use of verbs rather than nouns for each of the categories and a rearrangement of the sequence within the taxonomy. They are arranged below in increasing order, from low to high.

Bloom's Revised Taxonomy Sub Categories

Each of the categories or taxonomic elements has a number of key verbs associated with it
Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS)

• Remembering - Recognising, listing, describing, identifying, retrieving, naming, locating, finding
• Understanding - Interpreting, Summarising, inferring, paraphrasing, classifying, comparing, explaining, exemplifying
• Applying - Implementing, carrying out, using, executing
• Analysing - Comparing, organising, deconstructing, Attributing, outlining, finding, structuring, integrating
• Evaluating - Checking, hypothesising, critiquing, Experimenting, judging, testing, Detecting, Monitoring
• Creating - designing, constructing, planning, producing, inventing, devising, making

Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS)

The elements cover many of the activities and objectives but they do not address the new objectives presented by the emergence and integration of Information and Communication Technologies into the classroom and the lives of our students.

Bloom's digital taxonomy map

Key:
Elements coloured in black are recognised and existing verbs, Elements coloured in blue are new digital verbs.

Remembering

This element of the taxonomy does infer the retrieval of material. This is a key element given the growth in knowledge and information.

The digital additions and their explanations are as follows:

• Bullet pointing – This is analogous to listing but in a digital format.
• Highlighting – This is a key element of most productivity suites; encouraging students to pick out and highlight key words and phrases is a technique for recall.
• Bookmarking or favorite-ing – this is where the students mark for later use web sites, resources and files. Students can then organise these.
• Social networking – this is where people develop networks of friends and associates. It forges and creates links between different people. Like social bookmarks (see below) a social network can form a key element of collaborating and networking.
• Social bookmarking – this is an online version of local bookmarking or favorites, It is more advanced because you can draw on others' bookmarks and tags. While higher order thinking skills like collaborating and sharing, can and do make use of these skills, this is its simplest form - a simple list of sites saved to an online format rather than locally to the machine.
• Searching or "Googling" - Search engines are now key elements of students' research. At its simplest the student is just entering a key word or phrase into the basic entry pane of the search engine. This skill does not refine the search beyond the key word or term.

Understanding