Blooms Taxonomy Cognitive Affective Psychomotor
Blooms Taxonomy Cognitive Affective Psychomotor
Blooms Taxonomy Cognitive Affective Psychomotor
A teacher’s task is to try to continually move students to higher levels of human learning and development.
Planning for this development occurs through content and activities, moving students through advancing
levels once the basic steps are mastered. These various levels are defined in Benjamin Bloom’s
taxonomies or classification systems of educational objectives: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor.
Cognitive objectives emphasize memory and reasoning, affective objectives emphasize emotional, and
psychomotor objectives emphasize physical ability. The major categories in each domain are found in the
following chart that illustrates the hierarchy of levels:
Evaluation Nondiscursive
Judging, expressing own communication
opinion, based on criteria Ability to communicate
through body movement
(facial expressions, gestures)
Bloom (1956) Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia (1964) Harrow (1977)
Teachers are able to use Bloom’s taxonomy of Cognitive Objectives to create stimulating classroom
discussions at any grade level and with any topic. Asking different types of questions from the lower level
(knowledge and comprehension) questions to the higher level (application, analysis, synthesis, and
evaluation) questions stimulates the thinking processes. Higher level questions require students to
manipulate and use information in some manner.
Major categories in the Cognitive Domain of Bloom's Taxonomy and the verbs used for stating specific
behavioral learning outcomes are found in the following chart. Cognitive objectives specify what the
learner will be able to do intellectually as a result of instruction.