An Analysis of Bloom's Taxonomy in College Academia

I guess I shall roll out of the gate with a writing I did for a training session on "incremental" learning. The essay details my expectations of student cognition regarding academic knowledge.

--------------------
According to Bloom's taxonomy, the increasing levels of cognition a student should develop are as follows: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Each of the lower level skills should work together as the student moves from the basic collection of information to a mastery of that data.

In the introductory to mid-level undergraduate course range, the expectations from the student should be a bit lower than at higher academic levels. By the time any student reaches collegiate level classes, they should be able to quickly collect knowledge. Given their secondary education (although the guidelines for acceptable academic skills vary) most college students should be able to remember, understand, and apply knowledge. As they move from 100 to the 300 level courses, the discussions and paper assignments should work to broaden the understanding and application of that knowledge into analysis. While some students may show more progress than others, at this level of training the abilities to evaluate and synthesize knowledge into new forms may be rudimentary at best.

At the upper-level undergraduate course range, those expectations should again be raised. Previous exposure to course subjects, and the discourse that is expected should work to deepen the student's ability to analyze course information. Even beyond basic analysis, students should begin to evaluate the key ideas they are exposed to. When they are given directions on how to rate an idea, research paper, or theory, they should be able to work on the positive and negative elements contained within the material. On the upper end of the Bachelor-level education, it would also be within the student's ability to combine the deeper understanding, application, and analysis of existing ideas and begin to create new ideas.

Moving up to the Master's level course range, it is to be expected that abilities will continue to grow with experience. More complex understanding of information, paired with a larger knowledge base, should lead to better application of theories and ideas, a more in-depth analysis of such information, and a more detailed judgement of the merits (or lack thereof) to those ideas. Beyond this decision-making process regarding knowledge, master's level students should be able to work on creating new ideas that have progressed from their understanding of existing material. This ability to create new ideas should move from the basic to more detailed examples of knowledge.

At the culmination of collegiate learning, the Doctoral level, all of the levels of cognition covered by Bloom's taxonomy should be mastered by the student. Throughout the doctoral training, analytic, evaluative, and creative abilities should continue to develop and grow. By the end of the training, the student should have practical application of varying levels of knowledge in their area of expertise.