A guide to reading, writing, thinking and understanding Bloom’s Taxonomy A guide to reading, writing, thinking and understanding
Level 1 - Knowledge Remembering, memorizing, recognizing, recalling identification, recalling information Question Verb Cues: arrange, define, duplicate, label, list, memorize, name, order, recognize, relate, recall, repeat, reproduce, state, quote
AP Essay: 1-2 If you work at this level, you do not adequately comprehend the piece assigned and have not yet begun to work cognitively with this piece of literature.
Level 2 - Comprehension Understanding information, grasp meaning, interpreting, translating from one medium to another, describing in one’s own words, organizing and selecting details/facts Question Verb Cues: classify, describe, discuss, explain, express, identify, indicate, locate, recognize, report, restate, review, select, translate
AP Essay: 3-4 If you work at this level, you have achieved comprehension of the material but you have not moved into higher level thinking skills. You are not making insightful, developed inferences through careful analysis of the text.
Level 3 - Application Problem solving, applying information to produce some result, using facts/rules/principles Question Verb Cues: apply, choose, demonstrate, dramatize, employ, illustrate, interpret, operate, practice, schedule, sketch, solve, use, write
AP Essay: 5 If you work at this level, you have achieved comprehension of the material and some analysis, but your analysis is not sufficiently developed.
Level 4 - Analysis Subdividing something to show it is it put together, finding the underlying structure/pattern of a communication (text), identifying motives/hidden meanings, separating whole into component parts Question Verb Cues: analyze, appraise, calculate, categorize, compare, contrast, criticize, differentiate, discriminate, distinguish, examine, experiment, question, test
AP Essay: 6-7 If you work at this level, you have achieved critical thinking at the analysis level of Bloom’s taxonomy. This means you have broken the material down into its constituent literary parts and detected relationships of the parts and of the way they are organized. However, your inferences are not as insightful and well-developed as an 8 – 9 essay
Level 5 - Synthesis Creating a unique idea (old idea to form new idea), relating knowledge from several areas, combining ideas to form a new whole, predicting/drawing conclusions Question Verb Cues: arrange, assemble, collect, compose, construct, create, design, develop, formulate, manage, organize, plan, prepare, propose, set up, write
Level 6 - Evaluation Comparing and discriminating between ideas, assessing value of theories, making value decisions about issues, resolving controversies or differences of opinion, developing opinions, judgments or decision Question Verb Cues: appraise, argue, assess, attach, choose, compare, defend, estimate, judge, predict, rate, core, select, support, value, estimate, test, measure, explain, conclude
AP Essay: 8-9 If you work at this level, you have achieved critical thinking at the synthesis and evaluation levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. You put together the literary elements you have broken the piece into (through analysis), and present to your reader a sophisticated, critical understanding of the literature that indicates you have a clearly developed aesthetic or rhetorical sense regarding the piece.
AP Essay: 8-9 Your inferences are well-reasoned and thoroughly developed, demonstrating that you have been “moved” in some way by the piece and have a powerful response to it.