CHAPTER 2
Applying a Taxonomy to the Thinking in Your Classroom
Children are not vessels to be filled, but lamps to be lit.
—Swami Chinmayananda Saraswati
There are many taxonomies for classifying levels of thinking; however, Benjamin S. Bloom’s (1956) seminal work, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, establishes a taxonomy or classification system. In A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, editors Lorin W. Anderson and David R. Krathwohl (2001) suggest revisions that redefine the levels as Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create. These revised levels are the focus of this chapter—a lens through which you can view the strategies in this book, and the filter through which the strategies are organized.
The first three levels—Remember, Understand, and Apply—often require convergent thinking with similar student answers to assignments. However, the Analyze, Evaluate, and Create levels typify the sort of divergent thinking that supports a variety of correct solutions or products. Needless to say, the strategies in this book focus much more heavily on aspects of critical thinking that focus on divergent solutions to challenging problems, although we do start at Understand-level strategies as a base for building these skills. Sousa (2011) sums up the thinking at each of these levels as follows.
• The Remember and Understand levels involve students acquiring and understanding information.
• The Apply and Analyze levels describe students transforming information through deduction and inference. (The Analyze-level strategies in chapter 5, page 39, all implicitly involve Apply-level thinking as part of the process.)
• The Evaluate and Create levels describe students generating new information.
The revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy identifies cognitive processes under each level to clarify the level of thinking (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). It includes nineteen cognitive processes classified among the six levels (table 2.1, page 12).
To understand how to properly implement strategies for cognitive engagement at various critical-thinking levels, educators need to grasp the foundational knowledge of the depth of thinking required at each Bloom’s level. I find that, without a rooted understanding of the level of thinking complexity, educators tend to misidentify Bloom’s levels, often inaccurately believing their instruction is engaging students in higher levels of thinking.
Table 2.1: Bloom’s Taxonomy Revised
| Thinking Level | Cognitive Processes | |
| Remember | • Recognizing | • Recalling |
| Understand | • Interpreting | • Inferring |
| • Exemplifying | • Comparing | |
| • Classifying | • Explaining | |
| • Summarizing | ||
| Apply | • Executing | • Implementing |
| Analyze | • Differentiating | • Attributing |
| • Organizing | ||
| Evaluate | • Checking | • Critiquing |
| Create | • Generating | • Producing |
| • Planning |
Source: Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001.
To better interpret these Bloom’s levels and cognitive processes, I describe each of them in the following sections, along with examples of student-focused tasks that align to each level’s cognitive processes.
Thinking at the Remember Level
At the Remember level, learners must recover information they previously memorized. Although this is a low-level thinking process, memorizing information is important for higher-level thinking. For example, knowing the types of rocks can help students analyze problems with rock formations, a higher-level thinking skill.
There are two cognitive processes within the Remember level: (1) recognizing and (2) recalling.
Recognizing
Recognizing involves students selecting the correct memorized answer from a series of answer choices, like in a multiple-choice test. The following are examples of activities that use the recognizing cognitive process.
• Have students create a set of word cards and definitions based on textbook information using Quizlet (https://quizlet.com).
• Provide students with a list of terms and a list of definitions, and ask students to match them.
• Provide students with a series of shapes, and ask them to circle the shapes that are quadrilaterals, for example.
Recalling
Recalling requires students to provide a correct memorized answer from their memory, like for a fill-in-the-blank question. The following are examples of interactions that use the recalling sublevel.
• Ask students, “What feature is found at the top of a graph to tell the reader what topic is being displayed?”
• Say to students, “Through a process, plants use carbon dioxide to create oxygen and food. What is this process called?”
• Ask students, “What is the main function of each branch of the U.S. government?”
Thinking at the Understand Level
Where Remember-level thinking is critical for establishing foundational concepts, information that is not processed (or understood) at deeper levels is easy to forget. At the Understand level, students begin establishing new connections with the content.
There are seven cognitive processes associated with the Understand level: (1) interpreting, (2) exemplifying, (3) classifying, (4) summarizing, (5) inferring, (6) comparing, and (7) explaining.
Interpreting
When interpreting, students convert information from one form to another; this might mean changing text into paraphrases, pictures, graphics, or music. The following are examples of activities that use the interpreting cognitive process.
• Instruct students to use a novel’s cover to explain what they think the book is about. (Convert pictures