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Benjamin S. Bloom (February 21, 1913 – September 13, 1999), an American educational psychologist, made contributions to the classification of educational objectives and to the theory of mastery-learning.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Bloom's Theories 3 See also 4 Works cited 5 Further references

[edit] Biography

Benjamin S. Bloom was born on February 21, 1913 in Lansford, Pennsylvania. He received a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1935 and a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Chicago in March 1942. He became a staff member of the Board of Examinations at the University of Chicago in 1940 and served in that capacity until 1943, at which time he became university examiner, a position he held until 1959.^[1]

His initial appointment as an instructor in the Department of Education at the University of Chicago began in 1944 and he was eventually appointed Charles H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in 1970. He served as educational adviser to the governments of Israel, India and numerous other nations.^[2]

Bloom died on September 13, 1999.^[3]

[edit] Bloom's Theories

One of Bloom’s great talents was having a nose for what is significant. His most important initial work focused on what might be called ‘the operationalization of educational objectives’. Ralph W. Tyler was his mentor. When Bloom went to Chicago he worked with Tyler in the examiner’s office and directed his attention to the development of specifications through which educational objectives could be organized according to their cognitive complexity. If such an organization or hierarchy could be developed, university examiners might have a more reliable procedure for assessing students and the outcomes of educational practice.

One of the consequences of the categories in this taxonomy is that they not only serve as means through which evaluation tasks can be formulated, but also provide a framework for the formulation of the objectives themselves. Bloom was interested in providing a useful practical tool that was congruent with what was understood at that time about the features of the higher mental processes.

Bloom’s contributions to education extended well beyond the taxonomy. He was fundamentally interested in thinking and its development. His work with Broder (Bloom & Broder, 1958) on the study of the thought processes of college students was another innovative and significant effort to get into the heads of students through a process of stimulated recall and think-aloud techniques. What Bloom wanted to reveal was what students were thinking about when teachers were teaching, because he recognized that it was what students were experiencing that ultimately mattered. The use of think-aloud protocols provided an important basis for gaining insight into the black box.

He focused much of his research on the study of educational objectives and, ultimately, proposed that any given task favours one of three psychological domains: cognitive, affective, or psychomotor. The cognitive domain deals with a person's ability to process and utilize (as a measure) information in a meaningful way. The affective domain relates to the attitudes and feelings that result from the learning process. Lastly, the psychomotor domain involves manipulative or physical skills.

Benjamin Bloom headed a group of cognitive psychologists at the University of Chicago who developed a taxonomic hierarchy of cognitive-driven behavior deemed important to learning and to measurable capability. (For example, one can measure an objective that begins with the verb "describe", unlike one that begins with the verb "understand".)

Bloom's classification of educational objectives, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain (Bloom et al., 1956), addresses the cognitive domain (as opposed to the psychomotor and affective domains) of knowledge. Bloom’s taxonomy provides a structure in which to categorize instructional objectives and instructional assessment. He designed the taxonomy in order to help teachers and instructional designers to classify instructional objectives and goals. The taxonomy relies on the idea that not all learning objectives and outcomes have equal merit. In the absence of a classification system (a taxonomy), teachers and instructional designers may choose, for example, to emphasize memorization of facts (which makes for easier testing) rather than emphasizing other (and likely more important) learned capabilities.

Bloom’s taxonomy in theory helps teachers better prepare objectives and, from there, derive appropriate measures of learned capability and higher order thinking skills. Curriculum-design, usually a State (governmental) practice, did not reflect the intent of such a taxonomy until the late 1990s. Note that Bloom, as an American academic, lacks universal approval of his constructs.

The curriculum of the Canadian Province of Ontario offers a good example of the application of a taxonomy of educational objectives: it provides for its teachers an integrated adaptation of Bloom's taxonomy. Ontario's Ministry of Education specifies as its taxonomic categories: Knowledge and Understanding; Thinking; Communication; Application. Teachers can classify every 'specific' learning objective, in any given course, according to the Ministry's taxonomy.

[edit] See also

• Taxonomy of Educational Objectives
• David Krathwohl
• Higher-order thinking

[edit] Works cited

[edit] Further references

• Bloom, Benjamin S. (1980). All Our Children Learning. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Bloom, Benjamin S. Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Published by Allyn and Bacon, Boston, MA. Copyright (c) 1984 by Pearson Education.
• Eisner, Eliot W. "Benjamin Bloom: 1913-1999." Prospects, the quarterly review of comparative education (Paris, UNESCO: International Bureau of Education), vol. XXX, no. 3, September 2000. Retrieved from http://www.ibe.unesco.org/publications/ThinkersPdf/bloome.pdf on April 10, 2009.

Preceded by Lee Cronbach

President of the American Educational Research Association 1965-1966

Succeeded by Julian Stanley