Revisiting Bloom’s Taxonomy in the Age of Generative AI
Bloom’s Taxonomy has long served as a valuable framework for higher education faculty to conceptualize and assess different levels of student learning, aligning course outcomes with appropriate activities and assessments. In the era of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), it becomes increasingly important to reconsider these established approaches to ensure truly meaningful learning.
This resource utilizes Bloom’s Taxonomy as a foundational touchstone for faculty and instructional designers at The Citadel. It is intended to guide reflection on existing course activities, assessments, and, where necessary, course outcomes. The primary goal of this reflection is to identify potential adjustments needed to foster deep, meaningful learning in a landscape influenced by AI, while also exploring opportunities for the thoughtful and effective integration of GenAI by students. By revisiting Bloom’s Taxonomy through an AI lens, we aim to enhance educational practices and prepare students for success in an evolving technological world.
| Distinctive Human Skills | How GenAI Can Supplement Learning Processes+ | |
|---|---|---|
| Create | Engage in both creative and cognitive processes that leverage human lived experiences, social-emotional interactions, intuition, reflection, and judgment to formulate original solutions. | Support brainstorming processes; suggest a range of alternatives; enumerate potential drawbacks and advantages; describe successful real-world cases; create a tangible deliverable based on human inputs |
| Evaluate | Engage in metacognitive reflection; holistically appraise ethical consequences of alternative courses of action; identify significance or situate within a full historical or disciplinary context | Identify pros and cons of various courses of action; develop and check against evaluation rubrics |
| Analyze | Critically think and reason within the cognitive and affective domains; justify analysis in depth and with clarity | Compare and contrast data, infer trends and themes in a narrowly-defined context; compute; predict; interpret and relate to real-world problems, decisions, and choices |
| Apply | Operate, implement, conduct, execute, experiment, and test in the real world; apply human creativity and imagination to idea and solution development | Make use of a process, model, or method to solve a quantitative or qualitative inquiry; assist students in determining where they went wrong while solving a problem |
| Understand | Contextualize answers within emotional, moral, or ethical considerations; select relevant information; explain significance | Accurately describe a concept in different words; recognize a related example; translate to another language |
| Remember | Recall information in situations where technology is not readily accessible | Retrieve factual information; list possible answers; define a term; construct a basic chronology or timeline |
This work created by Oregon State University Ecampus is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).