R3 3.5 May 21, 2025 Reflection on Bloom's Taxonomy

Is the familiar learning pyramid useful, accurate, neither, or both?

In this issue, I’m going to be reflecting on one of the best questions I’ve fielded lately, which came to me via my colleague Kristen Betts. Once or twice a year, I get the pleasure of getting to talk to Dr. Betts’ students as a guest in her graduate seminars, and when I do, I always wrap up with the invitation to send me any additional comments or questions that come up after the meeting is over. This time, I was delighted when a student took me up on that offer, asking me to expand in an open-ended way on what I think about Bloom’s Taxonomy.

This framework is no doubt familiar to readers of a newsletter like R3; it’s often (although not always, and not originally) depicted as a tall pyramid with some key action verbs represented by distinct layers within the hierarchy. Each one represents a form of learning that students are supposed to become proficient in, with the implication that learners ascend the hierarchy in sequential order, moving from the base levels – remembering, understanding – up to the sophisticated activities – analyzing, evaluating, creating - at the top. It’s concrete, visualizable, and feels like it fits just about any subject or discipline as a conceptual description of learning.

But I do harbor some criticisms of the taxonomy, ideas that I shared with that graduate seminar and that probably prompted the question. I think – and most faculty probably already realize – that Bloom’s should not be taken as a strict, literal, or complete rundown of the cognitive processes at work during learning. To those of us who are focused on analyzing those processes in depth, each layer breaks down into a whole spectrum of sub-processes. Especially at the levels of remembering and understanding, there must be many such processes that have to go right in order for the whole thing to work. These are not simple processes, either, working less like passively capturing a recording (a poor metaphor for memory if there ever was one) and more like actively assembling a complex structure made up of representations, associations, and propositions.

Another thing that rubs me the wrong way about Bloom’s is that hierarchical and sequential quality that’s seemingly baked into the system. Especially in the way it’s commonly represented – pyramids, stair-steps leading to the Creating pinnacle and so on – it not only makes learning look far more lockstep than it actually is, it makes the lower levels look, well, low. It is this implied devaluation of the knowledge-base aspect of learning, i.e., the memory component, that I really take issue with. Education pundits may like to make memorization into the scapegoat for everything that’s outdated and wrong in pedagogy today, but in a bit of pushback of my own, I try to reinstate the value of having a solidly established base of knowledge as part of developing expertise in a discipline. Building such a base doesn’t need to aggravate test anxiety or detract from the joy of learning, and there are even a few suggestions from recent research that strengthening memories involving relevant facts might enhance students’ ascent up into the realm of complex thinking, rather than impeding it as the pundits tend to imply.

So should teaching centers stop handing out Bloom-decorated swag, and should we all be dropping those handy action verbs from our teaching vocabularies? No, and here’s why. First of all, Bloom’s is hands-down the most user-friendly and intuitive framework out there for identifying and tracking different types of learning objectives, learning activities, and assessments. Used in this way, it can reveal imbalances and disconnects between pedagogical intention and course design - for example, where the objectives of the course are mostly higher-level but the assessments are lower-level, or where most of the instructor’s time goes to presenting content rather than guiding students through practice of higher-level skills.

And because the system is so well known (at least in its earlier form and not the later, more complex revisions of the framework) it is also an invaluable tool for researchers seeking to design and disseminate their studies. Bloom’s categories are a common currency of sorts, allowing researchers to describe the nature of their materials and interventions in a way that is nearly universally comprehensible across disciplines and theoretical orientations. Psychologists Steven Pan and Timothy Rickard, for example, used it to help make sense of a vast research literature on the relationship between retrieval practice and transfer of learning; among their discoveries in this hefty meta-analysis was the finding that retrieval practice helps support transfer of learning particularly well when it taps into multiple levels of Bloom’s rather than just one.

Similarly, Bloom’s can help make sense of data showing how interventions interact with different sorts of course material. Pooja Agarwal’s 2019 study of lower- and higher-level knowledge development is a perfect example. By dividing up practice quiz questions along the lines of the taxonomy (higher-order versus lower-order), Agarwal was able to show that practice quizzes best support learning when those quizzes contain a mix of higher- and lower-order question types, as opposed to just a single type. The interpretation of the findings, as well, tapped into the conceptual basis for Bloom’s, while calling into question one of the implications of the hierarchy, the idea that you have to first complete the elementary, fact-based levels before moving on to higher ones. As Agarwal put it, “[i]f we want to reach the top of Bloom’s taxonomy, building a foundation of knowledge via fact-based retrieval practice may be less potent than engaging in higher order retrieval practice at the outset, a key finding for future research and classroom application.” I agree, and a familiarity with Bloom’s is what makes this complex set of findings more accessible to me and anyone else who wants to put the findings into practice.

So if you’re one of the many who have that colorful, multi-layered chart posted prominently over your computer monitor - don’t toss it in the recycling bin just yet. The framework may be an oversimplification of the sort that bothers specialists (including, sometimes, myself). But I can’t think of any single resource that’s been more influential, widely appealing, and plainly useful in the work we do. It’s easy to take a simple heuristic like Bloom’s for granted, but if it keeps helping us push pedagogy out of the realm of content presentation and into more aspirational, more engaging heights, it’s worth holding onto.

References and Suggested Reading

Agarwal, P. K. (2019). Retrieval practice & Bloom’s taxonomy: Do students need fact knowledge before higher order learning? Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(2), 189–209. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000282

Anderson, L.W. (Ed.), Krathwohl, D.R. (Ed.), Airasian, P.W., Cruikshank, K.A., Mayer, R.E., Pintrich, P.R., Raths, J., & Wittrock, M.C. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Complete edition).

Heer, R. (2012). A model of learning objectives. https://www.learningoutcomesassessment.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/RevisedBloomsHandout.pdf

Larsen, T. M., Endo, B. H., Yee, A. T., Do, T., & Lo, S. M. (2022). Probing internal assumptions of the revised Bloom’s taxonomy. CBE Life Sciences Education, 21(4), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.20-08-0170-CORRECTION

Miller, M. (2022). Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World. West Virginia University Press.

Pan, S. C., & Rickard, T. C. (2018). Transfer of test-enhanced learning: Meta-analytic review and synthesis. Psychological Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000151