Bloom\'s Taxonomy: Grading Reading Comprehension Bloom\'s Taxonomy

Bloom's Taxonomy: Grading Reading Comprehension

Bloom's Taxonomy offers a sequential method of grading a student's ability to comprehend a higher-level work of academic writing. According to Granello (2010), while she grants that the stages of the taxonomy are not absolutes, they are useful in painting a general portrait of how the "predominant skills and assumptions are perceived" by the teacher of the student's maturity and depth of perception (Granello 2001, 299).

The first stage of understanding is that of simple knowledge. For example, someone reading an article on Shakespeare should be able to understand that the main idea of the work was focused on the tragedy of Hamlet, and the specifics of the play. The second stage, comprehension, is the ability to understand and explain the main ideas of the work. Someone with only a rough knowledge of how to assimilate academic material often simply lists facts when trying to describe what he or she has read. However, a person who can comprehend the text can summarize the reading in a coherent way for a listener or reader.

The third stage, application, means that the reader can use the information he or she has read in a new fashion, beyond the specifics of the text. For example, the reader of the hypothetical Hamlet article would be able to see another, modern play, yet still be able to apply the concepts of the article to the tragedy, such as explaining why or why not Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman is or is not a classically-defined tragic figure like Hamlet.

The fourth stage, analysis, is more critical, and demands that the reader pass judgment and break down the methodology of the author, by judging whether the sources used by the author were valid, and if the author's assumptions were overly broad and sweeping. The fifth stage, synthesis, asks the reader to actually able to create something new from the material. Can he or she write a new article, engaging with the concepts of the original and come up with a new way of looking at Hamlet him or herself? The final, sixth stage is evaluation, and requires the reader to be able to place the scholarship in a larger context of other written literature. This is considered the highest stage because it requires some sense of previous scholarly context of the article. Some articles may have been important in a field years ago, but are not relevant to the current conversations going on within the discipline.

Bloom's Taxonomy can be a useful tool for a writer because it forces the writer to ask him or herself if he or she is really critically engaging with the material, or simply regurgitating the assumptions of the article's author. Am I actually looking at the material in a new way, analyzing it, and synthesizing to say something new, or am I just restating the writer's points? These are helpful questions to ask before finalizing an essay.

However, I strongly disagree that Bloom's hierarchy is always valid, as it seems to deemphasize the lower level forms of understanding a piece of writing. To be able to analyze something, a student has to understand the author's point, on a level of comprehension. It is easy to give a false analysis or synthesis without truly comprehending the article, and simply advance one's own point-of-view. In-depth comprehension and application is more difficult than it sounds on the surface, and to give a fully intelligible and justifiable evaluation of the work requires a strong knowledge base as well as higher-level abstract thinking skills.

Part II: Evaluating a selected scholarly article

Davis, Brennan & Christopher Carpenter. (2009). Proximity of fast-food restaurants to schools and adolescent obesity, American Journal of Public Health, 99 (3): 510-505

According to this scholarly article, an adolescent's proximity to fast food restaurants near his or her school is directly correlated to his or her risk of obesity. "Students with fast-food restaurants near (within one half mile of) their schools (1) consumed fewer servings of fruits and vegetables, (2) consumed more servings of soda, and (3) were more likely to be overweight" (Brennan & Carpenter 2009: 505). Of course, one obvious objection to the study might be that it is likely that schools located near fast food restaurants are more likely to have a student body with many high-risk factors for obesity, such as poverty.

The database that was used for the study was the 2001-2005 California Healthy Kids survey, which measured the consumption of healthy foods amongst schoolchildren from a wide array of demographic groups. To see if students who consumed more fast food were more apt to engage in other unhealthy behaviors, student's rates of smoking were also studied. But smoking was not correlated with proximity to fast food restaurants, despite the lower-income youths are more apt to smoke, just as they are more apt to eat unhealthy foods.