s', or 'structure', and Domain simply means 'category'. Bloom and his colleagues were academics, looking at learning as a behavioural science, and writing for other academics, which is why they never called it 'Bloom's Learning Structure', which would perhaps have made more sense to people in the business world. (Interestingly this example of the use of technical language provides a helpful lesson in learning itself, namely, if you want to get an idea across to people, you should try to use language that your audience will easily recognise and understand.)
Bloom's Taxonomy underpins the classical 'Knowledge, Attitude, Skills' structure of learning method and evaluation, and aside from the even simpler Kirkpatrick learning evaluation model, Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Domains remains the most widely used system of its kind in education particularly, and also industry and corporate training. It's easy to see why, because it is such a simple, clear and effective model, both for explanation and application of learning objectives, teaching and training methods, and measurement of learning outcomes.
Bloom's Taxonomy provides an excellent structure for planning, designing, assessing and evaluating training and learning effectiveness. The model also serves as a sort of checklist, by which you can ensure that training is planned to deliver all the necessary development for students, trainees or learners, and a template by which you can assess the validity and coverage of any existing training, be it a course, a curriculum, or an entire training and development programme for a large organisation.
It is fascinating that Bloom's Taxonomy model (1956/64) and Kirkpatrick's learning evaluation model (1959) remain classical reference models and tools into the 21st century. This is because concepts such as Bloom's Taxonomy, Kirkpatrick's model, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Mcgregor's XY Theory, The SWOT analysis model, and Berne's Transactional Analysis theory, to name a few other examples, are timeless, and as such will always be relevant to the understanding and development of people and organisations.
bloom's taxonomy definitions
Bloom's Taxonomy model is in three parts, or 'overlapping domains'. Again, Bloom used rather academic language, but the meanings are simple to understand:
- Cognitive domain (intellectual capability, ie., knowledge, or 'think')
- Affective domain (feelings, emotions and behaviour, ie., attitude, or 'feel')
- Psychomotor domain (manual and physical skills, ie., skills, or 'do')
This has given rise to the obvious short-hand variations on the theme which summarise the three domains; for example, Skills-Knowledge-Attitude, KAS, Do-Think-Feel, etc.
Various people have since built on Bloom's work, notably in the third domain, the 'psychomotor' or skills, which Bloom originally identified in a broad sense, but which he never fully detailed. This was apparently because Bloom and his colleagues felt that the academic environment held insufficient expertise to analyse and create a suitable reliable structure for the physical ability 'Psychomotor' domain. While this might seem strange, such caution is not uncommon among expert and highly specialised academics - they strive for accuracy as well as innovation. In Bloom's case it is as well that he left a few gaps for others to complete the detail; the model seems to have benefited from having several different contributors fill in the detail over the years, such as Anderson, Krathwhol, Masia, Simpson, Harrow and Dave (these last three having each developed versions of the third 'Psychomotor' domain).
In each of the three domains Bloom's Taxonomy is based on the premise that the categories are ordered in degree of difficulty. An important premise of Bloom's Taxonomy is that each category (or 'level') must be mastered before progressing to the next. As such the categories within each domain are levels of learning development, and these levels increase in difficulty.
The simple matrix structure enables a checklist or template to be constructed for the design of learning pro