2.3.

2 Bloom and Anderson's Taxonomy

In 1956, Bloom headed a group of educational psychologists who developed a
classification of levels of intellectual behaviour important in learning. This let to
Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, created by Bloom as a means of expressing
qualitatively different kinds of thinking (Bloom 1956). Bloom's Taxonomy has since been
adapted for classroom use as a planning tool and continues to be one of the most
universally applied models across all levels of schooling and in all areas of study.
Bloom identified six levels within the cognitive domain, ranging from simple recall or
recognition of facts as the lowest level, through increasingly more complex and abstract
mental levels, to the highest level which was identified as evaluation (Figure 6). Bloom
found that over 95 % of the test questions students encounter require them to think only
at the lowest possible level - the recall of information.

Figure 6 Bloom's (left) and Anderson's Taxonomy (right)(Schultz 2005)

During the 1990's, Anderson (a former student of Bloom) led a team of cognitive
psychologists to revisit the taxonomy with the view to examining the relevance of the
taxonomy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As a result of the investigation a
number of significant improvements were made to Bloom's original structure (Anderson
and Krathwohl 2001). For example, the title of each level is changed from nouns to
verbs; the 'synthesis' in the higher level is replaced by 'evaluating', and 'evaluation' on the
top is replaced by 'creating'. Table 1 describes the 'new' taxonomies:

Table 1 Definitions of Anderson's Revised Taxonomy

Definition
Verbs
Remembering: can the student recall or
Define, duplicate, list, memorize, recall,
remember the information?
repeat, reproduce, state
Understanding: can the student explain ideas Classify, describe, discuss, explain, identify,
or concepts?
locate, recognize, report, select, translate,
paraphrase
Applying: can the student use the
Choose, demonstrate, dramatize, employ,
information in a new way?
illustrate, interpret, operate, schedule,
sketch, solve, use, write
Analysing: can the student distinguish
Appraise, compare, contrast, criticize,
between the different parts?
differentiate, discriminate, distinguish,
examine, experiment, question, test
Evaluating: can the student justify a stand or
Appraise, argue, defend, judge, select,
decision?
support, value, evaluate
Creating: can the student create new product Assemble, construct, create, design, develop,
or point of view?
formulate, write
With a view to evaluate readers' comprehension of the narrative structure of an e-Book
rather than its' language, we choose to focus on the middle levels of the taxonomy
structure, which are: understanding, applying and analysing, and aim to develop
evaluation methods that apply the suggested verbs in the right column in the above table
(see below).