American Psychological Society accepted a convention on division of goals of the educational process suggested by American psychologist B. S. Bloom. According to his proposal, types of learning can be divided into three categories: cognitive (knowledge), affective (attitudes) and psycho-motor (skills). Within the cognitive category Bloom differentiates between 6 hierarchical levels of learning. Starting from the simplest, those levels are:

1. Factual Knowledge

Acquiring facts is the lowest educational goal. Knowledge is defined as memory of the content learned before. This memory can relate to a wide range of content: from acquiring the terminology, through remembering specific facts, all the way to memory of a complex theory. All that you need to achieve on this level of examination is to remember a certain fact, which does not necessarily include understanding. For example, a student should be able to memorize, define, describe, mark, enumerate or recognize.

2. Understanding

Understanding is defined as an ability to reflect on the meaning of the acquired facts. This cognitive category of knowledge can be demonstrated by interpreting the facts that were learned, summarizing them, explaining or predicting their effects or consequences. This educational goal is higher than the previous, and represents the lowest level of understanding. For example, for this level the student has to be able to interpret paintings, maps, charts and tables, transfer verbal problems into formulae, predict the consequences based on facts, give examples, interpret or paraphrase something.

3. Application

Application refers to ability to use the rules, laws, methods or theories in new concrete situations. For example, on that cognitive level a student should be able to solve a mathematical problem, create a graph or a curve and demonstrate appropriate use of a method or procedure.

4. Analysis

On the analytical level of knowledge a student has to be able to separate the learned content into its components and understand its organic structure. When doing that a student has to be able to determine the composing parts and the relations between them, as well as organic principles. This educational goal is higher than the levels of understanding and application, since it requires joint understanding of the content and of the organizational structure of the material. For example, on this level a student has to be able to compare, confront, recognize the unspoken assumptions, make a distinction between the facts and conclusions, as well as the cause from consequences, determine the relevance of data, analyze the organization structure of a piece of art ( music or literary work).

5. Synthesis

To synthesize means to create a new whole from individual parts. In this case the educational goal points out creative behaviour with emphasis on formulating new patterns or structures. Examples of educational goals on the synthetic level are: ability to combine, make a hypothesis, plan, reorganize, write a well organized paper, make a well organized speech (lecture), write a creative story (poem, song) or propose an experiment plan.

6. Evaluate

Evaluation is ability to make a meaningful judgement of the value of a certain material (poem, novel, speech, research report or a project). Evaluations must be based on precisely defined criteria. Educational goals of this area are the highest on cognitive hierarchy scale because they contain the elements of all the previous levels, as well as the ability to evaluate based on strictly defined criteria. Examples of educational goals on this level are: evaluating the adequacy of conclusions from the given data, evaluating the value of a piece of art (music or literary work) by using external standards of excellence, evaluate the logic consistency of a written material or a lecture.

 

Bibliography

Bloom, B.S. (Ed.) (1956) Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals: Handbook I, Cognitive domain. New York;Toronto: Longmans, Green.