Bloom\'s Taxonomy: Nursing Education Like Most Areas

Bloom's Taxonomy: Nursing Education

Like most areas of life, education has increased in complexity. Many new philosophies and a deeper understanding of the human mind have brought about a myriad new ways to educate students for their future lives and careers. Further complicating this is the fact that not all students respond uniformly to the same educational system or method. In addition, specific areas of study and their related professions have seen changes in focus and value systems, which need to be taken into account in the classroom. This is also true of nursing education. For this reason, Bloom's taxonomy of education has been found to apply well in terms of the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor skills required in nursing excellence.

The first domain of Bloom's taxonomy is the cognitive (Jones and Bartlett Publishers, n.d., p. 101). The focus of this domain is learned facts, including recall and recognition of these facts. The hierarchy of categories for this domain, from simple to complex, includes remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. What this means for the nursing student is that the simple recall of facts is only the first step within this domain. Educators need to focus on this domain in such a way that, ultimately, students will be able to use learned facts in order to create new knowledge that is applicable to specific situations encountered in practice (Mathur, 2012). The cognitive knowledge dimensions also imply an ultimate ability to apply critical thinking when working with learned facts. These dimensions include factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive knowledge (Jones and Bartlett Publishers, n.d., p. 104).

Second, Bloom has identified the affective domain of education, which includes feelings, values, appreciation, enthusiasm, motivations, and attitudes (Jones and Bartlett Publishers, n.d., p. 105). Since nursing is primarily focused on work with and around people, these feelings, values, and attitudes are of great importance in the process of health management. The categories included in his domain are receiving phenomena, responding to phenomena, valuing of objects, phenomena or behavior, organizing values, and internalizing values. In terms of nursing education, this domain therefore focuses on how the nursing student feels about the information presented during training. By means of, again, critical thinking, the nursing graduate will then be able to create his or her own unique value system that can be applied in the profession.

Whereas the cognitive and affective domains are based primarily upon mental knowledge and internal values, the psychomotor domain basis itself upon the physical skills involved in what is learned. It focuses on physical movement, coordination, and motor skills (Jones and Bartlett Publishers, n.d., p. 107). These are particularly important in the healthcare field, since good control over psychomotor skills can mean the difference between life and death. The categories included here are perception, readiness o act, guided response, mechanism, adaptation, and origination. Like the other domains, education in the psychomotor domain involves developing a nursing student by means of practice in such a way that he or she can finally use what is learned in practical and creative ways.