Reviving Bloom’s taxonomy

Abstract

The cognitive revolution and the increased focus on evidence-based practice that has swept through the teaching profession in recent years has undoubtedly brought with it many positive outcomes. Yet in the rush to embrace the modern, it would be wise to remember that many of these new ideas have very old roots, and rather than disregard the ancestral wisdom of our profession, we would be wise to look for guidance at the successes and failures of our forebears. Doing otherwise will inevitably lead to the educational equivalent of reinventing the wheel, and one need not look far for pertinent examples – after all, are Bruner’s (Wood et al. 1976) thoughts on scaffolding so very different from cognitive load’s guidance fading? Similarly, it does not take a huge leap of the imagination to see Ausubel’s (1960) advance organisers and the more modern knowledge organisers as examples of the educational version of parallel evolution. However, this cyclical tendency is not inevitable, and the current interest in mastery learning provides a wonderful opportunity to escape the reinvention trap by building on and learning from one of the classics of educational literature, Bloom’s taxonomy.

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ORCID for Christian Bokhove: orcid.org/0000-0002-4860-8723

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