Takes 5!

Bloom’s Taxonomy

In the early ’60s, Benjamin Bloom and a university committee identified three learning domains: cognitive, psychomotor, and affective. Because the project was completed by university folks, the terms may seem a bit abstract.

Trainers typically use knowledge (cognitive), skills (psychomotor), and attitude (affective) to describe the three categories of learning. In addition, trainers frequently refer to these three learning categories as the KSAs. You may think of these as the ultimate goals of the training process — what your learner acquires as a
result of training.

Bloom’s group further expanded on the domains. They created a hierarchical ordering of the cognitive and affective learning outcomes. Their work subdivided each domain, starting from the simplest behavior to the most complex: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. Each of these levels builds on the earlier one. For example, knowledge must occur prior to comprehension; comprehension
must occur before application. Each level of learning identified the desired specific, observable, and measurable result.

This work is known as Bloom’s Taxonomy. The divisions are not absolutes, and other systems and hierarchies have been developed since then. Bloom’s Taxonomy, however, is easily understood and may be the most widely applied.

It is interesting to note that although the committee actually identified three domains of learning, they applied the six levels to only the cognitive and affective learning domains. They did not elaborate on psychomotor (skills). Their explanation for this was that they had little experience teaching manual skills at the college level.

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