Sunday, November 2, 2008

Relating Bloom's Taxonomy and the Big6

I was nearly tempted, early on, to skip over this question because it seemed well ... just not really a question. They appear, again at first blush, to be related not at all. But the obvious doesn't always follow through.

After all, Bloom's Taxonomy is an organization of creative and thinking skills, of meta-skills, described in one of the Module 3 readings as " ... provid[ing] a way to organise (sic) thinking skills into six levels, from the most basic to the higher order levels of thinking." On the other hand, the Big6 is a prescription for getting a project or specified amount of work done and is, indeed, called a "model/tool" in the summary chart in Activity 3 of this module.

Both are solidly cognitive domain constructs, despite the revisions in Bloom's Taxonomy to incorporate the two other realms (affective and psychomotor).

Bloom's Taxonomy and the Big6 are strictly hierarchical and the temptation would be to map the levels of Bloom's to the steps of the Big 6. While perhaps an engaging intellectual exercise, it would seem ultimately futile:
The Creating level of Bloom's Taxonomy happens before the Big6 Evaluation step because its focus is on what happened. Similar arguments can be made against simple one-to-one matching of the other five levels and steps.

It seems that the best way to relate the two constructs is to consider each level of Bloom's Taxonomy as the method to explore or as a "checklist" for each step of the Big6. In other words, in order to complete Task Definition, you need to have answers relating to all of Bloom's Taxonomy from the literal, "What do I remember about this task, this subject, this project?" (remembering)) going through each level of Bloom's to arrive at the final definition of the task (creation).