Where on Bloom’s taxonomy is the department focusing its training?
Police training for adult learners should be focused on how the training will foster, encourage, and support problem solvers. If an academy or in-service training program focuses on the most basic level of providing knowledge, then it operates at the bottom of the thinking ladder. Police officers must analyze, synthesize, and evaluate dynamic circumstances every day. They are called upon to instantly and accurately respond to meet their community’s needs. What better place to begin this process of higher-order thinking than in the training programs? For an example of an educational taxonomy, see figure 1. Q4. Does the agency’s training staff create dynamic learning environments and do trainers recognize the key elements in transmitting and acquiring new information? The concept of teaching for adult learners—andragogy—is based on four crucial assumptions about adult learners characteristics and emphasizes that adult learning is self-directing (see figure 2). The adult learning test is
