How is critical thinking related to Bloom et al.s Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain?
Bloom and his colleagues (1956) produced one of the most often cited documents in establishing educational outcomes: The Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain. They proposed that knowing is actually composed of six successive levels arranged in a hierarchy: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation. Research over the past 40 years has generally confirmed that the first four levels are indeed a true hierarchy. That is, knowing at the knowledge level is easier than, and subsumed under, the level of comprehension and so forth up to the level of analysis. However, research is mixed on the relationship of synthesis and evaluation; it is possible that these two are reversed or they could be two separate, though equally difficult, activities (Seddon, 1978). Synthesis and evaluation are two types of thinking that have much in common (the first four levels of Bloom’s taxonomy), but are quite different in purpose. Evaluation (which might be considered equivalent to critic
