Bloom's taxonomy describes the capacity of the human brain to think. Each level from bottom to top becomes more complex.  The top level implies synthisizing various points of information and creating new and original thought.

The original Bloom’s Taxonomy contained six developmental categories: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The first step in the taxonomy focused on knowledge acquisition and at this level, students recall, memorize, list, and repeat information. In the second tier, students classify, describe, discuss, identify, and explain information. Next, students demonstrate, interpret, and write about what they’ve learned and solve problems. In the subsequent step, students compare, contrast, distinguish, and examine what they’ve learned with other information, and they have the opportunity to question and test this knowledge. Then students create a new project, product, or point of view. Finally students argue, defend, support, and evaluate their opinion on this information.

In the 1990s, one of Bloom’s students, Lorin Anderson, revised the original taxonomy. In the amended version of Bloom’s Taxonomy, the names of the major cognitive process categories were changed to indicate action because thinking implies active engagements. Instead of listing knowledge as a part of the taxonomy, the category is divided into different types of knowledge: factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive. This newer taxonomy also moves the evaluation stage down a level and the highest element becomes “creating” (aka in the context here as synthisophizing, integrating the wisdoms of history, based on fact and truth, into present culture)

Bloom's Original Taxonomy

Note that computers can process and correlate billions of bits of information per second, whereas the human brain at the consciousness level is very limited in that capacity. Also note that the human brain can integrate many pieces of related information and create new and original ideas, not just correlates.  Looking at Bloom’s taxonomy, computers can remember, understand, apply, analyze (correlate) and even evaluate information.  But at the top of Bloom’s taxonomy, only the human brain can create new and original ideas integrating many pieces information from many different areas and come up with something completely new and of possible societal value. In this case computers can't synthisophize: they can't figure out the wisdoms of history, much less integrate them into our present culture, only we and the human brain can do that.

Chapter 8

Bloom's Taxonomy

History of Bloom's taxonomy:

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a classification system created in 1948  by education psychologist Benjamin Bloom and several colleagues to categorize intellectual skills and behavior important to learning. Bloom identified six cognitive levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, with sophistication growing from basic knowledge-recall skills to the highest level, evaluation.

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