Krista Murphree

May 12, 2009

Benjamin Bloom

Background information:

Benjamin Bloom was born on February 21, 1913. He received bachelors and master’s degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1935, and a Ph.D in Education from the University of Chicago in 1942. He was an examiner at the University of Pennsylvania until 1959. He served as an educational advisor to the governments of Israel and India and numerous other nations.

Philosophies of education:

As a professor Benjamin Bloom met with the university and co-workers from 1948-1953 to create stairway of sorts with six steps to learning. This became known as Blooms Taxonomy. The levels of the staircase are thought to build upon one another. The six levels in the figure pertain to thinking and the cognitive domain.

Ben Bloom recognized that what was important in education was not that students should be compared, but that they should be helped to achieve the goals of the curriculum they were studying. Goal attainment rather than student comparison was what was important.

  1. Knowledge or recall of data, expresses the natural urge to recall previously learned material. Collect, recall, describe, identify, list or show.
  2. Comprehension, the ability to grasp meaning, explains, restate ideas, means understanding the basic information and translating, interpreting, and extrapolating it. Associate, compare, distinguish, discuss, estimate or group.
  3. Application, or using learned material in new situations, involves using information, ideas, and skills to solve problems, then selecting and applying them appropriately. Classify, change, illustrate, chart, develop, chart or use.
  4. Analysis suggests separating items, or separate material into component parts and shows relationships between parts. It also means breaking apart information and ideas into their component parts. Separate, arrange, infer, divide, or explain.
  5. Synthesis suggests the ability to put together separate ideas to form new wholes of a fabric, or establish new relationships. Combine, compose, generalize, plan, or rewrite.
  6. Evaluation is the highest level in this arrangement. Here the ability to judge the worth of material against stated criteria will show itself. Assess, describe, summarize, test, justify, judge or explain.

Bloom wanted to reveal . . . what students were thinking about when teachers were teaching, because he recognized that it was what students were experiencing that ultimately mattered.

Benjamin Bloom and the Taxonomy of learning, 2009. Retrieved on May 11, 2009 from