Case Study: Bloom's Taxonomy Vs. DOK

Bloom’s Taxonomy vs. DOK

Rose Brown

Mississippi State University

Bloom’s Taxonomy vs. DOK In formulating lesson plans and assessing student performance over the past 50 years, teachers have come to rely on certain tools to gauge the range of scaling criteria in order to analyze students’ performance relative to critical thinking skills, comprehension, and the ability to regurgitate critical information delivered to them via instruction. The backbone of these tools is Bloom’s Taxonomy, which has been used for more than five decades in such a capacity. Bloom’s Taxonomy was developed in 1956, with added dimensions having been revised for the five main descriptors in 2005. Bloom’s Taxonomy assesses cognitive

Jones further suggests that teachers lean more heavily on the DOK rather on Bloom’s Taxonomy when developing the lesson plans, so that they can clearly establish the expectations for the levels of understanding that they are proposing to students, and establishing the criteria for lesson outcomes in a concise manner. Jones further suggests not using Bloom’s Taxonomy for the same reason. His view is that the DOK’s design gives better projection to completion outcomes (Jones, 2014). The general argument with Jones is that the DOK does not address cognitive complexities for many subjects, and many of the verbs associated with the four levels bear little correlation to their respective level or with the DOK

The critical thinking component is not to be overlooked in the classroom, and this is where both Bloom’s Taxonomy and the DOK can be useful tools for preparing the lesson and assessing student milestones. Bloom’s Taxonomy is, undoubtedly, the most widely used of the two, but it does leave something to be desired relative to attaining the goal of completion to mastery. The downside of Bloom’s Taxonomy is the longivity of navigating through the levels, if taken literally (Wirth & Perkins,