Blooms Taxonomy - HMDD5603

My AVT score is 453.

I teach at a University where a range of Engineering Technology subjects are being taught. The challenge before us is to have a unified model of teaching and learning for teachers. How do we accomplish that? The challenges are that the teachers belong to diverse backgrounds, teach a range of subjects that call for different skill-sets from learners. Our objective is to go beyond just understanding and remembering information and concepts, but help our students apply it to different situations, analyze it using logic, create or synthesize, and evaluate. In other words use blooms taxonomy as the basis for our teacher training.

The fundamental change to start off with that bloom’s taxonomy accomplished in our teachers is to establish the difference between lower order thinking skills like understanding and reproducing to higher order thinking skills. For e.g. in our sessions with math teachers, this understanding was significant. How different is numerical methods from the theories of automata design? The former emphasizes lower order cognitive skills whereas the latter tested the student’s abilities to use logic, create and synthesize coherently. Even in a single subject, the teachers were encouraged to identify where the different skills needed to be applied and how. This led them to not just try to teach the subject, but creatively understand the concepts from a learner centred pedagogical perspective as well and act accordingly.

For this task I had a look at how our different senses can be use d by using the bloom’s taxonomy and arrived at the following.

	Bloom’s Taxonomy: OUM class on Instructional design
	Knowing	Understanding	Applying	Analysing	Creating	Evaluating
I enjoy reading, writing & speaking	Know the aims, objectives and terminologies of instructional design.	Understand the difference between instruction design and instruction as it is. Create a wiki post on an allied topic.	Apply an instructional design model for a class.	Analyze the instructional deisgn model taken and compare it against other approaches.	Design a course content fusing instructional design strategies.	Evaluate the content created for different classes of learners.
I enjoy doing hands-on activities	Start teaching a class using the principles learnt in the previous phase. Introduce the course and its objectives in a coherent manner.	Relate the course to everyday applications in the students lives.	Have students apply their knowledge of the course in specific problems and come out with answers.	Have the students compare their models with other possible approaches.	Have the students create a model that always comes up with the best solution for the given problem.	Have the students evaluate other students solutions against their s and see how different people have taken up the same task.

Blooms can help teachers in planning their lessons, devise proper assessment activities and standardize teaching. It also tells them if their teaching and assessment strategies have worked. For the learners, blooms helps them understand how they can study and will be assessed.

The utility of bloom’s taxonomy can be very telling in assessing our students. For this task, i tried to take my past question papers and sample answer scripts (which we are required to maintain as a part of auditing rules here) and see to what extent I have tested my students. From this I collected the marks and tried to correlate my experience. (It does help that my class strength is only 25). I found that the assessments where I had applied both lower order and higher order cognitive skills were more genuine and representative of who the students are (based on my knowledge of them personally) and their academic level. Hence my corollary here is that blooms can help in assessing the students and differentiating their skillsets. Incidentally I am going to take a more scientific approach and conduct a proper study in the coming semester to prove or disprove this notion.

One of the key aspects of this artifact is how i am applying it in everyday life. I took a session on Bloom's Taxonomy in an Induction Training workshop held in our University.  Also, i am working on a project that aims to apply and demonstrate Bloom's in everyday teaching in the University.