exzuberant: How do we visualise Bloom's Taxonomy?

I've been thinking a lot about Bloom's Taxonomy lately and just how influential it is to teachers' thinking. The more deeply I look into Bloom's Taxonomy, the more surprising things I find. However before we go there, here's a question for my teacher friends : If I say "Bloom's Taxonomy", what image do you form in your mind?

Now compare your mental image to the great Google mind....

Result of a Google Images search for "Bloom's Taxonomy"

Based on this search, I'm predicting your mental image is a pyramid. With labels like "Facts", "Knowledge" or "Remember" at the bottom rung, and perhaps "Synthesise" or "Creativity" at the top. And there's an implied, or maybe even explicit, upwardly pointing arrow. And that's how I remember Bloom's Taxonomy.

I couldn't help myself and did a frequency analysis of the first 60 images thrown up by Google. Just under 50% were pyramid versions, either the classic version:

Source: Learn NC, “Bloom’s Taxonomy,” used under a Creative Commons license.

or the updated 2001 Anderson & Krathwohl version:

Source: Learn NC, “Bloom’s Taxonomy,” used under a Creative Commons license.

Around 33% show the taxonomy in a grid with clear hierarchy:

https://mon.uvic.cat/clil/teaching-support/fonaments-teorics-aicle/thinking-skills/

https://www.teachthought.com/critical-thinking/249-blooms-taxonomy-verbs-for-critical-thinking/

Many of these diagrams come with arrows and labels to reinforce the visual message of hierarchy:

Less than 10% of the images present the taxonomy as components without a particular order - or more interestingly, as an integrated view:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blooms_rose.svg

Much to my surprise, the more deeply I read into the history of Bloom's Taxonomy, the critique of the taxonomy, it's 2001 reformulation and the more nuanced commentary by supporters and critics of the taxonomy, the more I realise my mental image of Bloom's Taxonomy is just plain wrong - and I think Bloom would say that too.

Scrolling further down the Google Images search result, much further down, image #76 reveals something very different which hints at the important (and much neglected) aspect of the revised 2001 taxonomy:

SOURCE: Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (2001). A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York, N.Y.: Pearson.

No more pyramid, no more hierarchy (mostly). Knowledge has been pulled out of the list and turned into a separate dimension. The other parts of the taxonomy have moved into a cognitive process dimension.

I find this summary from Julie Stern very helpful in understanding the change:

Few educators, including those who criticize the taxonomy, have considered the other major change to Bloom’s Taxonomy: the knowledge dimension. Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) have taken “knowledge” out of the cognitive domain and added it as a separate dimension, recognizing four distinct types: factual, conceptual, procedural and metacognitive. ... that instead of six ways to think about one type of knowledge, there are now six ways to think about four distinct types of knowledge.

https://sharemylesson.com/blog/what-no-one-tells-you-about-blooms-taxonomy

Here's a very nice attempt to show both dimensions from the 2001 model in one diagram without too much hierarchy

https://teachingcommons.lakeheadu.ca/blooms-taxonomy-21st-century-learners

The most serious problem with the pyramid view of the first iteration of Bloom's Taxonomy is that knowledge is right at the bottom and seen as something we just build upon, a "low order" thing (the lowest in fact). Versions of the 2001 pyramid omit the knowledge dimension, focusing solely on the cognitive processes, leaving most teachers with the impression nothing changed except the words, with knowledge now just called "remembering (facts)".

In the next blog post, I'll be looking at some of the issues resulting from using an oversimplified view of Bloom's Taxonomy. For now it's enough to point out many of us, myself included, have been guilty of lazy thinking. Maybe it's not our fault - it's the brain's wonderful design to simplify ideas so we can cope with them efficiently.

To finish off, here are two surprising 21st Century Learning versions of the taxonomy which really had me scratching my head. Observe that well motivitated and exciting as they are, both of the them have completely lost the knowledge dimension.

Ron Carranza's "Bloom's Digital Taxonomy".
I'm very pleased to see that by writing a blog post I'm at the top of the grid...
In the 21st Century we're not even "remembering", we're "bookmarking".