Nursing Equivalent of Bloom's Taxonomy?

classicdame, MSN, EdD · Oct 26, 2007

Unless you are writing a thesis you are wasting a lot of energy. Bloom's is considered the standard in nursing education.

VickyRN, MSN, DNP, RN · Oct 26, 2007

I believe this post (and entire thread) will be of assistance to you :)

https://allnurses.com/forums/1335697-post9.html

abooker · Nov 12, 2007

Blooms is considered the standard in pre-K through 12 education. I'm amazed to see it popping up here in post-secondary eduation, *especially* in nursing.

We've been discussing on other threads the attrition rate of nursing students, about 1/4 in many programs. The consensus seems to be that applicants need to be screened more carefully because many lack the basic math and English skills they need to be successful in a demanding program.

I'm not disagreeing that many people come to college unprepared, and that many drop out or are forced out of school before reaching their goal.

Could Bloom's Taxonomy be related to the empirical observation that many nursing student applicants come to school unprepared? Check out what some of our potential colleagues are being exposed to, long before they take the admissions test. They get this is elementary school. So did many of us, and many of our children. No wonder potential nurses might be terrified of dosage calculations!

I'm thinking Bloom's Taxonomy is responsible for providing "evidence based practice" for new math or new-new math or revisionist math or whatever we're calling it this week. Parents and many teachers and legislators are clamoring for "outcomes based" curicula now in our schools because folks are graduating high school without knowing the basics. But if nursing outcomes are based on the NCLEX which is based on the Taxonomy, then ... blargh!

In Colleges of Education, evidence-based practice has led to poor outcomes. In Colleges of Nursing, evidence-based practice ... could it be related to poor outcomes, too? Education journals seem to be citing Bloom's a *lot* and Colleges of Nursing are heavily influenced by Colleges of Education, and might be basing curriculum and evaluation decisions on questionable evidence. I'm still researching Bloom's, but it seems to be part of a larger movement called "constructivism"

Anderson and Keathwohl (2001) have tried to improve the taxonomy by using more outcome-oriented language, and by changing nouns to active verbs. "Knowledge" has become "Remember" and "Evaluate" has become "Create". I don't really see how this will improve things. The words have changed, but the theories that are correlated with failures are still there. A chief criticism about the Taxonomy that I've seen in Bloom's is that it doen't support constructivist theory very well.

I'm hoping to bounce some ideas around with allnurses.com community members, and see if I'm making mountains out of molehills. Bloom's Taxonomy came out in 1956 and was being cited in Nursing Journals in 1966, and a friend said, "frequently cited is used as proof of scientific validity". New math and whole language reading are frequently cited, too, but they don't work in education practice. Is Bloom's *working* for us?

llg, PhD, RN · Nov 12, 2007

I've done a little looking at other taxonomies, but not enough to have an intelligent discussin about them. I have a copy of Marzona and Kendall on my bookshelf, but haven't read it yet.

Before we start "blaming the taxonomy," we need to be sure that the old standards were implemented well and consistently. I don't think they were. In other words, you can't blame the taxonomy if it has been implemented badly. Therefore, it is not fair to Bloom to blame the taxonomy on the poor education and/or poor performance of graduates.

Another theory you might be interested in is not a taxonomy ... but a theory of experiential learning by David A. Kolb. His work is growing in popularity and is often used as a basis for reflective practice and other experiential learning programs. His model has 4 phases of learning -- Concrete Experience, Reflective Observation, Abstract Generalization, and Active Experimentation. That may have been what your instructor was excited about.

abooker · Nov 13, 2007

Before we start "blaming the taxonomy," we need to be sure that the old standards were implemented well and consistently. I don't think they were. In other words, you can't blame the taxonomy if it has been implemented badly. Therefore, it is not fair to Bloom to blame the taxonomy on the poor education and/or poor performance of graduates.

Busted! Ya got me ...

Bloom & Englehart & Furst & Hill & Krathwohl - it was a committee of college and university examiners who did the taxonomy but Bloom as editor gets all the credit -(Have ya heard the one about a camel being a horse designed by committee? - sorry - taxonomy-bashing again)

These folks were behaviorists, not constructivists. I owe the taxonomy an apology. the goal was to describe education like a biology, the "phyllum, class, order, genus, species" thing. There was a little prescribe too, saying "teachers building a curriculum should find here a range of possible educational goals or outcomes in the cognitive area." (1956; forward, pg. 1 and 2).

I do suspect that the taxonomy has been implemented badly ... very, very badly. Bloom, like fine wine, can perhaps be appreciated in moderation by mature adults in the Faculty Lounge, but I'm really, really uncomfortable w/ kids being exposed to him - or a horrible knock-off implementation of him - in elementary school.

So ... is there anything I can do? The old standards are, well ... old! "Traditional" seems to be a bad word, now. (No grant money for stating the obvious perhaps?) Bashing the "innovative" isn't helpful. I will do my homework and read "The New Taxonomy of Educational Objectives" by Marzano (a curriculum expert for K12 folks) and Kendall (a researcher for McREL, Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning) but I'm concerned that I'll just end up bashing the New Taxonomy and that won't be helpful, either.

I'm cutting and pasting this from McREL's web site at http://www.mcrel.org

"The latest issue of McREL’s magazine encourages educators to take a second look at their own practices and ask why they’re doing what they’re doing. Features include articles on understanding resistance to school-wide change efforts, teaching scientific inquiry, re-examining standards, and what to look for when observing teachers’ classrooms."

"Why" is a great question. (No such thing as stupid questions, right? I think it was someone's signature line here who said; "Of course there are stupid questions - what sort of question do you think stupid people ask?)

I've heard students ask, "Why does nursing school suck?" And I've heard nursing faculty ask, "Why are students unprepared?"

No stupid questions. I thought "Taxonomy" but now "implementation of taxonomies" and I don't know where to go from here ... it's a navigation issue. I don't think a GPS system is going to be able to help w/ this.

Anybody out there want to um ... "tell me where to go?"

llg, PhD, RN · Nov 13, 2007

Well, I would would suggest clarifying your goals, etc. before you go much further. What are you trying to accomplish by this exercise? Are you trying to re-design all of nursing education? ... at all levels? Then you should start with an understanding of how people learn and also research the history of nursing education and the environmental factors that influence the education of nurses. You should also become an expert on nursing itself, so that you will understand the nature of the content that needs to be taught.

... and ... What do K-12 have to do with it? etc.

Clarify your purposes and goals first. Then, devise a strategy to meet them.

abooker · Nov 14, 2007

I see College of Education theorists are guiding College of Nursing practice. This was surprising to me.

I'm sure I'll like Benjamin Bloom once I get to know him better. I'm looking forward to meeting Kolb.

abooker · Nov 14, 2007

OK ... I just wrote a journal entry about my personal frustrations at work. I want the people I'm responsible for to get "good enough" care. That's my immediate, short-term goal.

An intermediate goal is to continue my nursing education. This involves becoming some sort of parrot, apparently. I'm personally responsible for a new policy that restricts Nursing Trends papers in my ADN program to only five pages. Rather than regurgitating the textbook and my class notes, I expressed an alternative viewpoint. It was about 20 pages long, with lots of footnotes. The quality wasn't questioned; I got an "A" and all of us got a quantity restriction, and I became a target for bullying. I dropped out of the program, but am now ready to be a "good" student so I can perform better in the workplace. A good student is, apparently, a puppet of his or her advisor without independent views or the ability to make actual or potential contributions.

Long-term, I'd like to be able to effectively explore environmental factors that might be having a negative impact on nursing practice. There's a difference between "knowing that" and "knowing how" and I'm stealing that from somewhere ... epistemology?

"Knowing" is the bottom of the barrel in Bloom's Taxonomy, and obviously I'm a novice because I care about knowledge. I want to know how people learn. I want to know about Colleges of Nursing and what/how/why they are so tangled up with Colleges of Education. I don't know how to become an expert on nursing itself, because understanding comes from knowing, at least for me, and I don't know anything yet, and I blame Bloom. So, I'll read and gather information, and try to figure out how that information relates to knowing and understanding, and I'll work on that compassion thing, too, next time one of my colleagues appears to be reflecting a lack of knowledge about effective nursing practice.

llg, PhD, RN · Nov 14, 2007

I see College of Education theorists are guiding College of Nursing practice. This was surprising to me.
I'm sure I'll like Benjamin Bloom once I get to know him better. I'm looking forward to meeting Kolb.

As well they should be -- at least a little. When we want expertise in physiology, we consult the physiologists. When we want expertise in pharmacology, we consult the pharmacologists. When we want expertise in education, we consult with the education specialists. There is nothing wrong with that. That's the way it should be.

When those other disciplines want expertise in nursing -- they should come to us, not devise their own without considering our expertise in the subject matter.

mothership_2006 · Oct 19, 2008

A South African View

We are building a new curriculum, Didactics, dialogue, and blooms, understanding that the learner is involved with formulating learning outcomes from the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains, we use Gange's, Burrows taxonomy, Vigotski zone of proximal development, scaffolding, Burner Ausebel learning theories, check principles of instruction design. Thinking About Instructional Design:

Instructional Design as a Process:: Instructional Design is the systematic development of instructional specifications using learning and instructional theory to ensure the quality of instruction. It is the entire process of analysis of learning needs and goals and the development of a delivery system to meet those needs. It includes development of instructional materials and activities; and tryout and evaluation of all instruction and learner activities.
Instructional Design as a Discipline:: Instructional Design is that branch of knowledge concerned with research and theory about instructional strategies and the process for developing and implementing those strategies.
Instructional Design as a Science:: Instructional Design is the science of creating detailed specifications for the development, implementation, evaluation, and maintenance of situations that facilitate the learning of both large and small units of subject matter at all levels of complexity.
Instructional Design as Reality:: Instructional Design can start at any point in the design process. Often a glimmer of an idea is developed to give the core of an instruction situation. By the time the entire process is done the designer looks back and she or he checks to see that all parts of the "science" have been taken into account. Then the entire process is written up as if it occurred in a systematic fashion.; These are just thoughts formulate your own ideas, bridge gaps in learning, look at CBAM