What is Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy?

Many educators are familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy, a method of classifying learning objectives according to the different levels of thinking skills required. The 1950s-era taxonomy is generally depicted as a pyramid, with lower-order thinking skills at the bottom. Once these are mastered, learners can practice higher-order skills.

The original pyramid featured these skills:

In the 1990s, the taxonomy was updated to use active verbs: remember, understand, apply, analyze, create, and evaluate. They also switched the placement of the top two skills — create (formerly synthesis) and evaluate (formerly evaluation), placing “create” at the top of the pyramid. This recognizes that learning and thinking are active processes and places creation of new ideas and patterns at the pinnacle of human thought.

Build thinking skills

Human thinking and learning occurs along a continuum from basic cognitive activities, also called lower-order thinking skills, to higher-order skills.

The foundation of the Bloom’s pyramid — the lower-order skills — includes:

• Knowledge — knowing and remembering facts
• Understanding — categorizing or comparing information
• Application — using acquired knowledge in new situations.

Much corporate training focuses on these three levels.

Higher-order skills, often called “critical thinking” skills, are more abstract, thought to require more cognitive processing. They are useful in new and novel situations in which lower-order skills, such as remembering, might not help. These higher-order thinking skills include:

• Analysis — figuring out connections between concepts and ideas, identifying causes, and finding evidence to support a statement
• Synthesis — identifying or building a pattern from diverse elements, combining parts to create a whole
• Evaluation — forming, presenting, and defending conclusions based on judgments about information, determining the validity of ideas

Bloom’s Taxonomy provides a structure for guiding learning.

In 2008, Andrew Churches created a version called Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy, adding verbs that address forms of learning and creating that reflect the digital age.

Taxonomy provides assistance in developing learning goals & content

Like the original taxonomy, Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy offers lists of related verbs that instructional designers can use to develop learning objectives. In creating content, they can progress from lower-order skills like recalling information and defining terms, to higher-order skills like applying information in new situations, identifying connections among concepts or ideas, and analyzing and evaluating content to form an opinion or determine whether information is credible.

The digital taxonomy integrates verbs and tasks used for digital learning and creating, and includes verbs and suggested activities that pertain to eLearning and other approaches to online learning and exploring, such as: