Bloom's Taxonomy and Mind Maps;

We covered quite a few things in class again last Wednesday, and performed a really interesting group exercise with Mind Maps.

I would like to go into a bit more of detail about Bloom's Taxonomy as an exercise to help myself understand it better. Probably not a fun blog read !

Bloom's Taxonomy, identifies three domains of educational activities. The domains can be thought of as goals of the learning process. That is at the end of your learning, you should have acquired new knowledge, new skills and possibly a new attitude.

Cognitive Domain: mental skills (Knowledge) comprise of

• Knowledge; which is understanding of facts, ways and means of dealing with facts and understanding the universal principles and abstractions in a field.
• Comprehension; which is understanding the meaning of the facts by translation, interpretation and extrapolation.
• Application; solving problems in a new manner using previously acquired knowledge.
• Analysis; examining and breaking down the information into parts to identify motives and causes.
• Synthesis; combining elements of previously acquired knowledge in different ways to create alternative solutions.
• Evaluation; Based on certain criteria judge the validity of ideas or information.

Affective Domain: growth in feelings or emotional areas (Attitude) comprise of

• Receiving; The lowest level; comprises of the learner paying attention and absorbing the knowledge; without this no further progress can occur.
• Responding; the learner actively participates in the learning process at this level.
• Valuing; the learner attaches value or worth to a particular object, phenomenon or behavior. This can range from simple acceptance to a complex state of commitment.
• Organizing; at this level, the learner can organize the differences between values, by contrasting and resolving conflicts between them.
• Characterizing; or internalizing values; the learner has a value system which controls their behavior at this level, such that it becomes a characteristic.

Psychomotor Domain: manual or physical skills (Skills)

Bloom's committee did not produce a description for the psychomotor domain, but Simpson (1972) described it in more detail. Psychomotor domain includes physical movement, coordination and use of the motor skills.

• Perception; using your sensory responses to guide motor activities.
• Set; the readiness to act, which includes physical, mental and emotional sets.
• Guided Response; the early stages of learning a complex skill which requires imitation and trial and error.
• Mechanism; intermediate stage in learning a complex skill, e.g. driving a car.
• Complex Overt Response; a skillful performance of motor arts that involves complex movement patterns, for e.g. parallel parking the car you learned to drive.
• Adaptation; the learners skills are developed enough that they can modify movement patterns for special cases.
• Origination; create new movement patterns to fit a particular problem.

We also touched briefly on constructivism, a theory of knowledge that believes we as individuals construct new knowledge through the process of accommodation and assimilation. This can be separated into

• Cognitive constructivism; which explores how the individual learner understands things.
• Social constructivism; which puts an emphasis on how social encounters lead to growth of learning.

A part of the constructivist theory, is the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), proposed by Lev Vygotsky. Think of ZPD as a form of scaffolding. The child can reach the lower level by themselves. But in order to scaffold to the higher level, they need assistance from an adult or more skilled children. Thus, the ZPD can capture the cognitive skills of the child which are in the process of maturing.

We also talked about traditional vs non-traditional learning spaces, that is a traditional university vs an online university, or charter school or high school. I would like to spend a little more time researching the statistics and the software used for online programs, and hopefully address it in detail in another blog post.

For now I would like to move onto our exercise in trying to devise ABCD for a learning objective, and then expand on the evaluation techniques to test the learning objectives and create a mind map for it.

Catherine, Tanya, Deonne and I got to work on trying to build an online learning environment for Dr.Lucerno, who had always taught in a traditional learning environment. It was a great exercise, and we went quite in depth into trying to understand the needs of the students from different backgrounds and schools, and also those of Dr.Lucerno, who was completely unfamiliar with instructing using technology.

After defining ABCD for the problem, we decided to go ahead and work on defining the evaluation methods. During this we realized that all of our ideas did not necessarily fit into evaluation, but were still necessary for the success of the online program, and so we created two new categories "Course Structure" and "Course Materials" based on our understanding of what we wanted the online program and Dr.Lucerno to have. Here is our final mind map created on mindmeister.

While we did have pretty good material, I think our presentation skills could still use a bit of work :). Ricardo, Paul, Jaehi and Mike did a great job with that. So here's to better presentation skills for the next round !