Unit One: Scientific Literacy

Return to: Course Overview-Blooms Taxonomy | Unit Two Blooms Taxonomy in Social Studies

An Introduction and History of Blooms Taxonomy

Learning Objectives

Participants will be asked to create a unique definition for each part of Bloom's Taxonomy. Participants will be asked to develop student perspective while completing knowledge and comprehension based tasks

Ticket In the Door

Part 1

• Take the following list of terms and create a definition in your own words and then explain how each one can be seen in a social studies class room

1. Knowledge
2. Comprehension
3. Application
4. Analysis
5. Synthesis
6. Evaluation

Part 2

• Watch the following YouTube video and list 2 facts and 1 question you have after watching the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksqNcBhDNXA

Discussion

Please click on the the Discussion tab at the top of the page for our unit 1 discussion. There will be two parts of this discussion, one here at the beginning of unit 1 and the final piece at the end of unit 3.

Mini-Lecture

"In 1956, Benjamin Bloom with collaborators Max Englehart, Edward Furst, Walter Hill, and David Krathwohl published a framework for categorizing educational goals: Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Familiarly known as Bloom’s Taxonomy, this framework has been applied by generations of K-12 teachers and college instructors in their teaching.

The framework elaborated by Bloom and his collaborators consisted of six major categories: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. The categories after Knowledge were presented as “skills and abilities,” with the understanding that knowledge was the necessary precondition for putting these skills and abilities into practice.

While each category contained subcategories, all lying along a continuum from simple to complex and concrete to abstract, the taxonomy is popularly remembered according to the six main categories."(Armstrong, 2020)

Source-https://www.azquotes.com/author/31395-Benjamin_Bloom

Bloom's Taxonomy is made up of seven major components Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation and Creation each of which has an important role in the social studies curriculum. In order to broaden our understanding as well as focus our learning we will focus on each part in an individual way and build up to our end of module assignment.

• Knowledge "involves the recall of specifics and universals, the recall of methods and processes, or the recall of a pattern, structure, or setting.” (Armstrong, 2020)
• Comprehension "“refers to a type of understanding or apprehension such that the individual knows what is being communicated and can make use of the material or idea being communicated without necessarily relating it to other material or seeing its fullest implications.” (Armstrong, 2020)

These two components are viewed as the lowest rungs of Bloom's Taxonomy from a cognitive perspective, as one who has mastered these levels can typically only recall learned information on command and summarize material. These are important skills to master when learning material, but as we move forward it will become clear that we must strive to push our assessment tools far beyond knowledge and comprehension based assignments. Though these are often the easiest types of assessments to create we often learn very little about our students ability and does little to engage long-term learning aspirations.

To conclude this mini-lecture read the following article and reflect how these changes and the lack of commitment as some may say to social studies may impact your teaching strategies. Think about ways you can engage other subjects into the teaching of social studies as well, along with ways to make your students experience less about knowledge and comprehension and more about the higher levels of Bloom's.

• https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/summer-2019/what-changed-in-social-studies-education

Learning Activities

Part 1 → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqzkCFL3ZUY

• Watch this YouTube Video which applies Blooms Taxonomy to the popular TV show Friends and write down when you see effective and ineffective learning strategies.

Part 2

Source-https://printable-maps.blogspot.com/2011/12/blank-map-of-united-states.html

• Task- Label each state on the map.
• Task- Estimate the 10 largest states by population, and explain why you believe their population is so high.

Ticket out the Door

MY QUESTION

• During your learning activities for this unit you watched another video that demonstrated the different rungs of Blooms Taxonomy, as well as worked with some common geography questions. Can you determine a students ability from those two geography activities, what students may struggle with those types of questions? In what ways could you take those same questions based around the map and make them into higher-level questions for your students?