Bloom's Taxonomy Examples: Using It to Design an Online Course

Bloom’s taxonomy sorts what you want learners to do by the kind of thinking it takes: remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate and create. For course design, its real use isn’t choosing verbs. It’s checking. Put every objective, every practice activity and every quiz question on the same grid, and you can see at once whether your course asks learners to do anything beyond recall, and whether your assessments test the thinking your objectives promise.

Most pages on Bloom’s taxonomy stop at the six levels and a list of verbs. This guide works through one course from start to finish, uses the half of the revised taxonomy most guides leave out (the kind of knowledge), and looks at what the research says about the most common way the taxonomy is misused: as a ladder learners must climb one rung at a time.

What Bloom’s taxonomy is, in its revised form

The original Taxonomy of Educational Objectives was published in 1956 by Benjamin Bloom and colleagues. It sorted objectives into six categories: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. A revision, led by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl, was published in 2001. Krathwohl, one of the original authors, summarised the changes a year later (Krathwohl, 2002):

• The categories became verbs, so they describe what a learner does.
• Synthesis was renamed create and moved to the top, above evaluate.
• Each objective now has two parts: a cognitive process (the verb) and a kind of knowledge (the noun).

The six cognitive processes, in Krathwohl’s definitions, with an example objective from a short gardening course we’ll use throughout:

The four kinds of knowledge, again in Krathwohl’s words:

• Factual: “The basic elements that students must know to be acquainted with a discipline or solve problems in it.” The names of pests, the symptoms of overwatering.
• Conceptual: “The interrelationships among the basic elements within a larger structure that enable them to function together.” Why nitrogen deficiency yellows older leaves first.
• Procedural: “How to do something.” How to test soil, how to mix a spray.
• Metacognitive: “Knowledge of cognition in general as well as awareness and knowledge of one’s own cognition.” Knowing when you can’t tell two problems apart and need a second opinion.

Cross the two dimensions and you get a grid of 24 cells, which Krathwohl and his colleagues called the Taxonomy Table. That grid is the tool.

The example course is invented, but typical of what independent creators sell: a horticulturist building a short self-paced course that teaches home gardeners to diagnose and fix common plant problems.

Step 1: Write the objectives, then place each one on the grid

Start with objectives you’ve already written. If you haven’t, our guide to writing learning objectives covers how; the performance goal from the analysis phase of the ADDIE model is the place to start.

Then place each objective in one cell: which process does it ask for, and what kind of knowledge does it work on? Here is the gardener’s first draft, eight objectives:

Step 2: Read the gaps

Now look at where the numbers fall. Krathwohl describes this as one of the main uses of the table:

The gardener’s grid has five of eight objectives in one cell, remember-factual, and nothing at all beyond apply. Yet the course promise is “diagnose and fix common plant problems”: analysis and evaluation, on conceptual and procedural knowledge. The grid shows the course as drafted would teach learners to recite pest names and leave them stuck in front of a real yellowing tomato plant.

This pattern is common. Krathwohl notes that when the original taxonomy was used to analyse curricula and tests, “almost always, these analyses have shown a heavy emphasis on objectives requiring only recognition or recall of information” (Krathwohl, 2002).

A gap doesn’t mean every cell needs filling. A short course might sensibly have nothing in create. The question is whether the cells you’ve filled match the job the learner will do afterwards. The gardener’s revision:

Fewer objectives, and every one of them now points at the course promise.

Step 3: Put activities and assessments in the same cells

An objective on the grid is only a promise. The table earns its keep when you plot the practice and the assessment for each objective in the same cell. Krathwohl notes it can classify “the instructional and learning activities used to achieve the objectives”, and the assessments too. If an analyse objective is practised with a recall quiz, the grid makes the mismatch visible.

For the gardener’s analysis objective:

One catch is easy to miss: a question’s level depends on what the learner has already seen. Crowe, Dirks and Wenderoth, who built a tool for rating biology exam questions on Bloom’s taxonomy, point out that if students are given the answer to an analysis question in class and then meet the same question on an exam, “then that question only requires recall” (Crowe et al., 2008). If the gardener’s assessment reuses the practice photos, it has quietly become a memory test. New cases keep it at analysis.

Rating questions also takes judgement. In the same study, at least two of the three raters agreed on a question’s level more than 91% of the time, which the authors report as high reliability. That’s good, but it isn’t automatic. If you can, ask a colleague to place your questions on the grid without seeing your labels, and talk about the ones you disagree on.

Step 4: Don’t climb the ladder one rung at a time

The taxonomy is often drawn as a pyramid, and the pyramid invites an assumption: learners must master the facts at the bottom before they can analyse or judge anything. Many courses follow it literally, with several modules of definitions before the first real problem.

The revision itself softened this. In Krathwohl’s words, “the requirement of a strict hierarchy has been relaxed to allow the categories to overlap one another” (Krathwohl, 2002). And there is some direct evidence on the assumption. Agarwal ran two experiments with university students in a laboratory and a third in a sixth-grade classroom, testing retrieval practice (recalling information from memory rather than re-reading it) with quizzes of fact questions, higher order questions, or a mix (Agarwal, 2019).

Fact quizzes improved performance on a later fact test, higher order quizzes improved performance on a later higher order test, and a mix of questions helped on both kinds of test in the second and third experiments. The evidence comes from a small number of experiments in specific subjects, so we’d call it some evidence rather than settled. But it gives no support to the idea that a course has to finish the facts before it reaches the thinking.

In practice, we’d mix levels from the first module. The gardener can open with a photo of a sick plant and ask for a guess, teach the three nutrient symptoms, then return to the same photo and ask again. The facts are learned in the act of using them. Our guide to writing multiple-choice questions shows how to write quiz questions that test application and analysis rather than recall.

Step 5: Check the whole course on one page

Once every objective, activity and assessment is on the grid, look at the whole course on one page. Three questions are worth asking:

1. Do the assessments sit in the same cells as the objectives? An objective with no assessment in its cell is one you can’t show learners have met.
2. Is the mix right for the course promise? A course about doing something should have most of its weight in apply, analyse and evaluate, with recall objectives only where they support them.
3. Is there any metacognitive knowledge? It is the row most courses leave empty, and for self-paced learners, who have no teacher watching, knowing what they don’t yet know matters.

The grid also helps with load. If one lesson asks for analysis of new cases before learners have the concepts they need, it will feel overwhelming; our library entry on cognitive load theory explains why, and the fix is usually a worked example first, not a module of definitions.

When developing online courses at Avondale University, we have to make a conscious effort to build out the multi modal interaction with the material. University lecturers are often great in a classroom, but translating that personal touch into online learning, particularly asynchronous courses, forces the microcredential team to build in reflections, interactivity and personalisation to make sure the learner is putting the knowledge to use.

Bloom’s taxonomy examples across three courses

The same six processes look different in different subjects. Here is one objective at each level for three typical online courses:

Notice that “explain”, “identify” and “choose” could sit at more than one level depending on the task. That is the problem with verb lists: when Stanny analysed 30 published lists, 45.5% of the verbs appeared at two or more levels, and “choose”, “relate” and “select” appeared at all six (Stanny, 2016). The task decides the level, not the verb.

Four common mistakes

1. Using the taxonomy only to pick verbs. A verb from the “analyse” column doesn’t make an analysis objective. Check the task.
2. Treating higher as better. Remember objectives are fine when the job needs instant recall. The goal is a match with the job, not a course full of “create”.
3. Testing at a lower level than you taught. Or, more often, reusing practice items in the final quiz, which turns analysis into memory.
4. Saving the thinking for the end. Mix levels from the first module rather than spending the first half of the course on definitions.

What to do next

Take your current course outline and place every objective and every final-quiz question on a six-by-four grid. Circle any objective with no question in its cell. That list is your revision plan.