Technology and Bloom’s Taxonomy: Evaluation
March 5, 2007
Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy of learning domains, originally developed in 1956, is one of the most well-known and widely-used schemas of educational objectives. Though three distinct schemas were originally created, the one dealing with the cognitive domain remains the most important and most applied.
The sixth and final category in Bloom’s Taxonomy, Evaluation, is the focus of the March newsletter. Evaluation has to do with an individual’s ability to weigh and judge alternatives, choose an option, and justify that selection through some measure of analysis. An example of the Evaluation category would find a student assessing a problem and recommending a novel solution, critiquing an existing approach or solution that is not adequately addressing a problem, or judging the relative worth of several choices.
Many technologies can assist you with enabling students to develop their abilities in the Evaluation domain.
- Using the
Classroom Performance System (CPS) in your classroom allows you to prompt students to forecast outcomes of novel situations and problems you pose, demonstrating their understanding of causal relationships.
- The
discussion boards in myWPI provide a venue for students to critically reflect upon opinions rendered and positions taken by their fellow students, and to posit their own informed judgments. Because the discussion boards operate in an asynchronous manner, there is no pressure to respond immediately, giving the student an opportunity to consider multiple alternatives and integrate research into their response.
- Multimedia Simulations, which often take the form of learning objects, may be used to demonstrate the relative merits of several different solutions. For instance, when building a bridge, simulations could be used to visualize the types of bridges one might construct, and what the drawbacks of those solutions may be financially, structurally, and pragmatically. The Media Production group of the Academic Technology Center provides simulation development services.
- Bloom, B.S., Engelhart, M.D., Furst, E.J., Hill, W.H., & Krathwohl, D.R. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: Handbook I, cognitive domain. New York: Longman.