What is Bloom’s Taxonomy?
Bloom’s Taxonomy is a framework that classifies learning objectives by cognitive complexity. The revised version names six levels: remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate and create. Instructional designers use it to write objectives with precise action verbs, to check that activities and assessments match the intended level, and to build courses that progress from recall to higher-order thinking.
How Personal Academy handles it
Personal Academy has its AI Course Studio draft course outlines with action-verb learning objectives that the author reviews and edits before building the course.
A worked example
Suppose a 300-person accounting firm writes a course on a new revenue rule. The first objective, list the five steps of the rule, sits at the remember level and is checked with a short quiz. A later objective, evaluate whether a contract meets the criteria, sits at the evaluate level and is checked with a case study that a reviewer marks against a rubric.
Benjamin Bloom and colleagues published the original taxonomy in 1956 to help educators share a common language for objectives and exams. It ordered the cognitive domain into knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. In 2001 Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl revised it, renaming the levels as verbs and swapping the top two: remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, create.
The revision also added a second dimension, the type of knowledge: factual, conceptual, procedural and metacognitive. An objective can be placed in a grid, for example applying procedural knowledge or evaluating conceptual knowledge, which helps designers see what kind of practice is needed.
In practice, the taxonomy is most useful for writing objectives. Each objective starts with an observable action verb that matches the intended level: define or list for remember, explain or summarise for understand, use or calculate for apply, compare or diagnose for analyse, judge or justify for evaluate, design or compose for create. Vague verbs such as know or appreciate are avoided because they cannot be observed.
The second use is alignment. If an objective asks learners to evaluate, a multiple-choice recall question cannot show that they can. Assessments and activities should sit at the same level as the objective they serve.
The taxonomy is sometimes misread as a strict ladder that every learner must climb in order. Most designers treat it as a guide: lower levels often support higher ones, but real tasks mix several levels at once, and a course for experts may start high. Used this way, it keeps objectives, practice and assessment pointing at the same skill.