Cammy, I think you have advanced a few paces . . . lol

Thanks for the post Tom.

Dave is right on, at least in regards to how I used taxonomies.

As a beginning instructional designer with no formal training, objectives were presented to me as a formula to complete. Plug and play. The taxonomy simply provided the list of verbs you could choose from. Could have made a drag and drop exercise of all those verbs and completed the objectives that way.

Take some good descriptive writing of how to complete a task, tack on a few learning objectives upfront and voila! you’ve created training and are now an instructional designer!

Hopefully, I’ve advanced a few paces from that place.

They have been more helpful to me in identifying appropriate learning strategies than creating the perfect action verb. But, they have less a place in the more holistic learning models I mentioned, which remain performance based.

Cammy Bean has a fun informal survey going that identifies some of the backgrounds of practicing instructional designers.

http://learningvisions.blogspot.com/2007/11/instructional-designers-liberal-artists.html

By that I mean: the relatively inexperienced designer of training, who’s looking for a workable model to help make sense out of the task at hand. Bloom’s verbs (which were suggestions, not entries in the Federal Register) were one way to do that. Mager’s approach, another. Me, I’m fond of the heydad test as a quick summary: “Hey, Dad, watch me while I [state objective here].”

You can see what that does to “appreciate the advantages of SPIN selling.”

At the other end–often characterized by the number of people at that end who have tenure–you’ve got Talmudic arguments about processes versus concepts versus principles versus instantiations. These mostly remind me of arguments about whether X is a vision statement or a mission statement.

Let me agree that I too worry about whether these taxonomies are being used and/or used well.

I’m thinking (not sure yet) that these taxonomies may simply be unworkable for most learning professionals. Moreover, perhaps they actually harm learning.

Let me add a couple of points:

A group of learning researchers (etc.) got together and published an “updated” version of Bloom’s taxonomy in 2001.

A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing — A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives; Lorin W. Anderson, David R. Krathwohl, Peter W. Airasian, Kathleen A. Cruikshank, Richard E. Mayer, Paul R. Pintrich, James Raths and Merlin C. Wittrock (Eds.) Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 2001.

They have 4 Knowledge Dimensions:

Factual
Conceptual
Procedural
Metacognitive

And 6 Process Dimensions

Remember
Understand
Apply
Analyze
Evaluate
Create

Imagine a 6×4 table…

Also, many others have their own taxonomies, for example there is another book, now in its 2nd edition: Marzano, Robert J., Kendall, John S. Title : The new taxonomy of educational objectives / Robert J. Marzano, John S. Kendall. 2nd ed. Published: Thousand Oaks, CA : Corwin Press, 2007.

My sense of how these taxonomies are utilized is that learning professionals try to examine their current learning interventions in comparison to the taxonomy; THEN they see if they are over-reliant on lower levels of the taxonomies and try to enrich their learning interventions with more complex and meaningful learning events.

Seems good, AND we learning professionals must constantly beware of too-simple of designs–BUT isn’t there a better way? I keep coming back to the Magic Question, “What do we want our learners to be able to do, and in what situations do we want our learners to do those things?” Perhaps in conjunction with this: “In what situations and under what circumstances do we want our learners to remember/utilize what they learned in our learning interventions? How can we prepare them for this?”

I still haven’t sorted this all out, but there has to be a simpler more effective way than these complicated taxonomies.

Maybe this is what Mager was getting at, though clearly his system has not done enough to create such outcomes, judging from the inadequate designs we see regularly.