PrintBloom's Taxonomy
Please review Bloom's taxonomy and note what I mean when I say demonstrate higher order thinking skills.
- Knowledge - is the lowest level of learning outcomes. Memorizing and recalling a wide range of facts, data, or even complete theories falls into this category. Being able to remember and regurgitate facts from reading assignments is an example of this category. This is NOT an acceptable level of scholarship for graduate studies.
- Comprehension - occurs when you understand the meaning of the material. You can demonstrate comprehension by interpreting the material through explanation or summation, by showing effects or consequences, or by translating the material from one form to another. While comprehension is critically important, it is still NOT an acceptable level of scholarship in graduate study.
- Application - is the ability to take knowledge that you comprehend and apply it to new situations. This could include applying new methods, principles, concepts, theories, or laws to new situations. Application demonstrates higher order thinking than simple memorization and comprehension and will often be required in follow-on technically oriented courses.
- Analysis - is essentially taking something and breaking it apart to see how it works. Deconstructing something to see its component parts and how they relate to the organizational structure are good examples of analysis. Analysis is higher order thinking because it requires an understanding of both the content and structure of the material in question. Graduate level coursework will often ask you to analyze something as part of an assignment.
- Synthesis - is essentially taking several different ideas and putting them together to form a new whole. This might mean taking numerous research sources, analyzing them, and then taking select components to build a new idea presented as a paper or presentation. Synthesis stresses being creative in formulating new patterns, ideas, or structures. Your reflection papers, case studies, and research papers will often demand that you synthesize various inputs.
- Evaluation - is the ability to make judgments about the usefulness, value, or veracity of given material for a specific purpose. The judgment must be based on definite criteria rather than instinct, faith, or feeling. These criteria may be external (relevance to purpose) or internal (organizational criteria). Evaluation is the highest in the cognitive hierarchy as it includes the other elements plus a conscious value judgment based on defined criteria.
Critical Thinking Skills
While you will have to demonstrate some knowledge and comprehension, you must demonstrate the ability to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate complex ideas to produce a satisfactory reflection paper. Now review the cognitive skills of the critical thinker:
- Interpretation is to comprehend and express the meaning or significance of a wide variety of experiences, situations, data, events, judgments, conventions, beliefs, rules, procedures, or criteria. The three sub-skills of interpretation are categorization, decoding significance, and clarifying meaning.
- Analysis is to identify the intended and actual inferential relationships among statements, questions, concepts, descriptions, or other forms of representation intended to express belief, judgment, experiences, reasons, information, or opinions. The three sub-skills of analysis are examining ideas, detecting arguments, and analyzing arguments.
- Evaluation is to assess the credibility of statements or other representations which are accounts or descriptions of a person's, perception, experience, situation, judgment, belief, or opinion; and to assess the logical strength of the actual or intended inferential relationships among statements, descriptions, questions or other forms of representation.
- Inference is to identify and secure elements needed to draw reasonable conclusions; to form conjectures and hypotheses; to consider relevant information and to educe the consequences flowing from data, statements, principles, evidence, judgments, beliefs, opinions, concepts, descriptions, questions, or other forms of representation. The three sub-skills of inference are querying evidence, conjecturing alternatives, and drawing conclusions.
- Explanation is to state the results of one's reasoning; to justify that reasoning in terms of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, and contextual considerations upon which one's results were based; and to present one's reasoning in the form of cogent arguments. The sub-skills under explanation are stating results, justifying procedures, and presenting arguments.
- Self-Regulation is to self-consciously monitor one's cognitive activities, the elements used in those activities, and the results educed, particularly by applying skills in analysis, and evaluation to one's own inferential judgments with a view toward questioning, confirming, validating, or correcting either one's reasoning or one's results. The two sub-skills here are self-examination and self-correction.
You must demonstrate the appropriate critical thinking skills based on the approach you take. On this first paper, you may want to explicitly articulate the higher order thinking skills and type of critical thinking that you are applying. Please do not ruin the flow of your paper by overdoing this explicit articulation (be subtle).
This may seem daunting and cause some of you to worry. Remember that I am on your side and I want to help you develop these skills. As you get into this very intellectually stimulating exercise, I hope that you will actually find that critical thinking and concise written reflection are enjoyable.