Bloom’s Taxonomy:
Critical Thinking Skills for Kids
We all want our children to use necessary critical thinking skills. Thanks to Bloom’s
Taxonomy, parents can help develop and strengthen their child’s thinking abilities at home. Unfortunately, teachers and parents are more likely to ask children questions at the Remembering level which is the lowest level of thinking. This includes questions like: who, what, where, when and why. These types of questions only require children to use memorisation in order to respond.
Bloom’s Taxonomy is named after
Benjamin Bloom, a psychologist who in
1956 developed the classification of questioning according to six levels of higher level thinking. Bloom’s Taxonomy was revised in 2001.
As parents, we want to encourage our children to think for themselves and to avoid peer pressure and fad thinking. We want them to have the skills necessary to listen, analyse and interpret the information that will be a constant part of their lives. Memory and understanding are part of this process, but to succeed in further processing this flow of knowledge requires higher level techniques.
There are many sites which offer charts of
Bloom’s Taxonomy with examples of the various levels of questioning. A recommended chart is: http://wed.siu.edu/faculty/JCalvin/bloo mstax.pdf
Here are some examples of how to use
Bloom’s Taxonomy with your child:
Most questions asked of children fall in either the Remembering or Understanding level. I encourage parents to move to a higher order in the taxonomy when questioning their child, which are Bloom’s next four levels.
These include:
Applying: Ask your child how they would solve a given real-life problem. Ask why they think something is significant. Ask your child to continue a story or predict what would happen in a given situation.
Encourage your child to make a diorama or model of what they learned on a given topic.
Analysing: Ask your child to identify motives or causes from real-life stories.
Encourage them to conduct an inter-view or survey. Have your child make a flow chart, family tree or role play a real-life situation.
Evaluating: Ask your child to form and defend an opinion on a subject. Kids, especially teens are pretty good at this one. Example: encourage your child to write a letter to an editor or evaluate a character’s actions in a story.
Creating: Ask your child to put together several bits of old information to form a new idea. Such as, ask them to create, design or invent a new item, proposal or plan. This requires a bit of creativity and the ability to think in the abstract.
After asking several higher level Bloom’s
Taxonomy questions, during various conversations, you will get a feel of your child’s ability to think critically.
Be patient and give your child extra think time to respond because if your child is not used to higher level questioning or using their brain for this type of thinking, it may take some time for them to process and be able to