Educational Taxonomies

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• Cognitive | Intellectual Skills
• Affective | Values Attributes
• Psychomotor | Manual Skills
• Metacognitive | Personal Epistemology
• Interpersonal | Communication Skills

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• Posters available (see here)

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Overview

My interest in the visual representations of taxonomies began sometime in 1998 when I began developing materials to teach HTML at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. I fell in love with the structural representations of nested elements and variables in HTML code and started looking for ways to do much the same with Bloom’s taxonomy. I didn’t have much success, but in 2001, when Anderson and Krathwohl published their reworked version of the cognitive domain, my interest was piqued again. This time, because I was now working at the Open University (UK), I was trying to develop academics to think beyond the cognitive domain and adopt broader educational horizons.

See Courseware pages for High Resolution versions

At some point along the way, I encountered the work of John Biggs and his SOLO taxonomy, structured in a progressive, increasingly complex way. I had also come across a circular description of Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy, and I began an experiment with that same form for a range of other educational taxonomies. At the same time, trying to convey Bigg’s notion of constructive alignment. One of the criticisms of any educational taxonomy is the implication that skills are either developed independently of prior skills or, conversely, that each level is required to reach higher levels. For this reason, I never felt comfortable with the pyramid representation of Bloom’s. I perceive the circular representation as being more fluid and flexible.

I am convinced that ALL courses, modules and programmes have room for all of the five domains identified. Indeed, I believe that learning designers have a duty to consider whether their course can be completed without them. Clearly, the balance between disciplines and students at different levels will make a difference to the outcomes incorporated into any course design. Dance and chiropractic students might realistically expect to encounter more psychomotor learning than a statistics student, although the latter can count their mastery of SPSS as a psychomotor skill. All students might be expected to develop their affective skills, although the caring professions, education and health are likely to give this primacy. All students are likely to need to develop their interpersonal skills, though how explicitly this need is assessed varies. Lawyers are required to demonstrate their advocacy skills, but I would suggest that a chemist would also benefit from ensuring they can communicate as effectively.

Structure of Circular Representations

Common to all five taxonomies is the representation of the domain as a circle, which I believe makes the subcategories feel more fluid. This avoids the notions of levels and instead replaces them with segments or categories of skills. Taxonomies are not strictly hierarchical, although they do underpin subsequent categories. Each contains the proto-verbs at the centre, the next circle contains active verbs, which also represent teaching and learning activity, and the outer circle contains the nature of evidence (or assessment forms) that might demonstrate the active verbs. Using the circle also gives an inherently clock-face-like visual, which makes the dialling up from basic to more sophisticated concepts as you travel clockwise. Maybe its most powerful function is to encourage lateral thinking among learning designers, prompting them to explore learning and teaching activities as assessment or evidence examples simultaneously.

This resource will develop over time. It will benefit from your comments and observations. I am particularly interested in hearing about different language interpretations other than English.

Older Blog posts

Here are the key blogs on this site documenting the development of this ‘Taxonomy Circles’ work.

• Interpersonal Domain (2018/08/01)
• Defining Transferable Skills (2017/19/03)
• Graduate Competencies, Employability and Educational Taxonomies: Critique of Intended Learning Outcomes (2015/18/07)
• Is Higher Education lacking its affective dimension? (2015/03/31)
• Adaptation of Dave’s Psychomotor Domain (2014/12/07)
• Visualisation of Educational Taxonomies – introducing paper. (2013/08/22)
• Visualising Outcomes: domains, taxonomies and verbs. (2012/10/17)
• Updated: Taxonomy Circles – Visualisations of Educational Domains (2012/11/13)
• Learning Design becomes mission critical (2012/10/14)
• Intended Learning Outcomes matter (2012/10/12)

 

Paper

This paper outlines the conceptual design of the taxonomy circles and the way they might be used to design learning outcomes and learning and teaching activities. Taxonomy Circles: Visualizing the possibilities of intended learning outcomes