One of the general objectives in education is to facilitate learning at higher cognitive levels. The idea here is that if learning takes place where the student is applying and creating, then these new skills will be generalizable beyond just the context of that given skill. If the learner is only remembering and regurgitating facts, then he or she may remember them long enough to take a test or recite something, but forget them or have difficulty applying them to other contexts.
Bloom’s Taxonomy17 was developed not only as an effective measurement tool for student learning, but also as a way to develop common language regarding learning goals and curriculum development across multiple instructors relative to a given subject area.18 Bloom’s Taxonomy also provides the opportunity to explore the depth to which a given subject area can be studied. Updated in 2002, Bloom’s Taxonomy consists of the following levels relative to the cognitive domain:19
Remember: Remembering, the least complex of the categories, is a process of storing and retrieving knowledge from long-term memory through processes such as recognizing or recalling relevant facts or attributes.
Understand: The next category, understanding, involves determining the meaning of instructional messages and communication, including oral, written, and graphic messages. This can include classifying, summarizing, or explaining a given text or communication.
Apply: Applying is the process of using or carrying out a procedure in a given situation. This can involve executing or implementing a system or procedure for a new context or set of facts.
Analyze: Analyzing involves breaking material down, identifying how its constituent parts relate to one another, and identifying how these parts relate to an overall structure or purpose, including differentiating and organizing the material.
Evaluate: Evaluating is the process of taking criteria and standards and using them to make judgments or assessments. This involves drawing on a set of criteria to check or critique material.
Create: Creating involves the formation of an original product or a novel, coherent whole by combining elements or putting them together. This includes generating, planning, or producing new material.
The In Class sections of Chapters 2 to 70 note the learning experiences and assessment possibilities for facilitating higher-order cognitive thinking in the financial planning classroom. These tables should assist faculty in developing class activities and assessment avenues that further higher-order cognitive thinking in financial planning preparation programs. These charts are designed for all program types and delivery methods.
BLOOM’S TAXONOMY
*This note will mark activities that are appropriate for on-campus course.
**This note will mark activities that are appropriate for both on-campus and distance courses.
It is important to note that the first two levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy have generally been omitted in this book. Remembering and understanding are common actions in any classroom or online learning platform and would not be as useful to the reader. The suggested student assessment avenue may consist of both formal and informal assessments.
PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE CAPABILITIES
Almost any individual working within a given profession or occupation, or any other activity for that matter, strives to take the journey from novice to expert. The path to expertise is more than mere education and repetition; rather, it requires individuals to move from a reliance on rules and principles to contextual experiences and to change their perception or understanding of a given context or situation from bits of information to a composite whole.20 The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition is a five-step model that outlines the path from novice to expert relative to these two paradigms. The stages are:
Stage One – Novice: This first stage of skill acquisition is characterized by the novice becoming familiar with a set of features that are recognizable without any experience. These features can be described as context-free or non-situational. In addition, the novice is then given a set of rules that determine actions on the basis of these features. At this stage of skill acquisition, the novice learns to follow these rules consistently.
Stage Two – Advanced Beginner: In the advanced beginner stage, while consistently following the given rules, the student begins to recognize examples of new features that can be effectively identified or learned only through experience. These new situational features are added to the context-free features that the student recognizes, and new rules are introduced that incorporate these examples. The advanced beginner continues to learn to follow given rules in a consistent manner, but is able to incorporate situational as well as non-situational factors when learning and applying these rules.
Stage Three – Competence: At the skill acquisition stage where students attain competence, they have absorbed enough features and rules that attending to all potentially relevant features and analytically applying rules has become overwhelming, and they must develop an approach where they can differentiate among more and less important elements of a situation. Competent performers learn to choose a perspective or formulate a plan that allows them to effectively make decisions by restricting them to only a few of the possibly relevant features of a situation. Through this, competent performers also become emotionally involved in the outcome of their decision making because this outcome depends not only on the adequacy of the rules that they have been given but on their accuracy in choosing a plan or perspective.
Stage Four – Proficiency: At the proficiency stage of skill acquisition, the emotional involvement developed at the competence stage, which strengthens the performer’s ability to distinguish between successful and unsuccessful perspectives, allows the proficient performer to accurately assess situations and choose relevant plans and perspectives. This intuitive situational awareness, though, does not extend to decision making, and proficient performers fall back on the analytic rules they have learned to respond to the goals they have identified and the features that they have identified as being important.
Stage Five – Expert: At the expert stage of skill acquisition, performers then move past the situational awareness that distinguishes the proficient performer to both divide these situations into nuanced subclasses and to attach reactions to them that have, in their experience, been successful. The expert both assesses situations and responds to them intuitively, drawing on his or her vast experience to identify desired outcomes and relevant situational features and also to determine which course of action will be most effective.
In this book, the professional practice capabilities are divided into three levels based on this Dreyfus model – entry-level, competent, and expert – each of which illustrates the financial planning professional’s ability to make appropriate decisions within a complex environment as well as the planner’s progression from strict adherence to rules to use of past experiences to define future action.
The reader is encouraged to use these practice capabilities to both self-assess competency relative to a given concept as well as plan future education and experience that may facilitate a higher level of expertise. Financial planning firms may utilize these capabilities to facilitate formal and informal mentorship programs within their organizations.
IN PRACTICE
Each of the chapters in Part One outlines many of the contexts that exist in financial planning, specifically relative to the topic of that particular chapter. These contexts, or vignettes, are designed to provide the student, practitioner, and instructor with specific situations in which this concept arises in real life as well as to offer some of the variables that may impact the decisions of the financial planner.
Relative to each of these contexts, the reader