Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about Bloom’s Taxonomy

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a framework for describing educational objectives in the cognitive domain. A committee chaired by Benjamin Bloom published the original handbook in 1956. A 2001 revision, led by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl, restated the levels as verbs and added a knowledge dimension.

It is a widely used planning tool. It is not “the most important education framework”, and it does not by itself prove that learning must always move in a strict ladder. Last reviewed: 30 August 2026.

Who was involved

Bloom chaired the group. He did not invent every later domain by himself. The 1956 handbook is the cognitive domain. Affective objectives were published later. Psychomotor taxonomies were developed by other authors. Krathwohl worked on the original project and on the revision, so “two former students of Bloom” is the wrong story for Anderson and Krathwohl together.

The six revised levels

1. Remember: retrieve knowledge.
2. Understand: construct meaning.
3. Apply: use a procedure in a situation.
4. Analyse: break material into parts and relate them.
5. Evaluate: judge against criteria.
6. Create: put elements together into a new product or structure.

The 2001 revision also asks what kind of knowledge is in play: factual, conceptual, procedural or metacognitive. A remember task about a procedure is not the same as a remember task about a name.

A worked example

In a lesson on water safety: remember the named signs; understand what “strong current” means; apply the rule to a new beach photo; analyse why two sources disagree; evaluate which warning is clearer for Grade 5; create a short briefing for parents. Each step needs its own evidence. The verb alone is not enough.

Limits

The original authors did not claim that the brain always works in one direction, or that remembering requires no understanding in any sense. Teachers should not treat lower levels as worthless, or higher levels as moral superiority. For ready-to-use questions see question stems. For alignment of objectives, activities and assessment see the practical guide. For digital tasks see Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy.

Sources

1. Bloom, B. S. (ed.) (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Handbook I: Cognitive Domain.
2. Anderson, L. W. and Krathwohl, D. R. (eds.) (2001). A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing.
3. Krathwohl, D. R. (2002). “A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy: An Overview.” Theory Into Practice 41(4), 212-218.