For more than 60 years, generations of teachers have used Bloom’s Taxonomy in their planning and teaching.

The taxonomy is a means of categorizing the level of abstraction, specificity, and complexity in the questions and tasks we pose to our students. There are six levels in the taxonomy: Knowledge/Remembering,  which is the lowest level and is characterized by simple recall of facts. Next is Comprehension, which includes inference, compare and contrast tasks, and understanding information. The third level is Application, solving problems and using knowledge. Analysis asks students to look for patterns and organize parts. Synthesis is where new learning takes place, using existing knowledge and ideas to formulate new ones and to bring together knowledge and facts from different areas. The final level, Evaluation, is assessing what has been learned, including one’s own ideas.    

Although all six levels are important, my experience as a mentor teacher, plus discussions with colleagues, revealed that many teachers concentrate heavily on the first three levels (i.e., knowledge/remembering, comprehension, application), neglecting the last three (i.e., analysis, synthesis, evaluation).

This is unfortunate, because learning does not take place in the first three levels, but in the last three. One reason for this neglect is that many teachers find it difficult to incorporate the entire taxonomy into their planning and teaching. Yes, it can be difficult initially, but if we want to facilitate new learning, using all six levels is critical.

I offer here a research/writing project, suitable for fifth grade and up, that effectively incorporates all levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.  The following are the guidelines I gave my students.

Giraffes in Hawaii

There are giraffes in Africa but none in Hawaii. You live in Hawaii, and you’ve always loved giraffes. You decide you are going to bring giraffes to live in the wild in Hawaii, but you realize you can’t just go out and bring over a bunch of giraffes. There are many things you have to know, many questions you have to identify and answer first. Once you have the answers to your questions and the knowledge you need, you can decide whether your project will work. Here, then, is your assignment:

After researching giraffes and Hawaii, write a comprehensive report stating whether you believe healthy giraffes brought from Africa will survive in Hawaii. “Survive” here means three things: they will remain healthy, they will reproduce, and their offspring will remain healthy and reproduce.

Step 1: Make a list of all the questions you need to answer.
Step 2: Research “giraffes” and “Hawaii” to answer the questions.
Step 3: From your research, draw conclusions about the possibility of giraffes surviving in Hawaii.

Remember: There is no right or wrong answer in this assignment. You will be graded on three things: the quality and completeness of your questions, the quality of your research (these two account for half your grade), and how well you support your final conclusion, that giraffes will or will not survive in Hawaii.

Compare this kind of task with simply assigning students a report on giraffes or on Hawaii. Either one of these addresses only the first three levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy: knowledge, comprehension, and application. True, the assignment will sharpen research skills and may add somewhat to the student’s overall body of knowledge, but it does nothing to require or even encourage original thinking. Postulating the survival of giraffes in Hawaii, however, requires students to think at all six levels of the taxonomy. They have to know, comprehend, and apply what they know, organize it, relate knowledge from different areas to help them draw conclusions and, finally, assess their conclusions. Even the first step in the assignment, making a list of questions to be answered, requires all six levels. Questions about food, climate, terrain, and predators all require a student to organize information so as to make comparisons between Africa and Hawaii.

Without question, of all the hundreds, if not thousands, of reports I’ve read as a teacher, “Giraffes in Hawaii” were the most interesting and the ones that demanded the most of my students.

David G. Gardner is an education professor at Antioch University located in Seattle, WA.