ECOMP/6102/ Paula Rogers
Reflection on the Reasoning Essay
The assignment Course Goal for the week: Assessments serve articulated
purposes. This was an authentic writing project on assessment because it directly aligned
to the teaching and assessment of students. As a reading and math specialist I am daily
evaluating my student’s progress and teaching them strategies to enhance their learing. In
this course I have investigated the use of classroom assessments to make decisions about
instruction and student learning. We have learned how to improve our student
assessments and hopefully that will improve our student’s desire to learn.
The assignment caused me to reflect on “best practice” instruction based on two very
well known researchers, Benjamin Bloom and Rick Stiggins. I have already been using
Bloom’s Taxonomy and Stiggins’ patterns of reasoning elements in my classroom. My
goal is to help my students to learn to focus and organize their thinking into reasoning.
Essay
In the essay I compared Bloom’s Taxonomy to Stiggins’ patterns of reasoning.
Stiggin's deductive reasoning pattern and Bloom’s application have many commonalities
as well as differences. Rick Stiggins, in An Introduction to Student-Involved Assessment
FOR Learning, has identified six patterns of reasoning. They are analytical reasoning,
synthesizing, comparative reasoning, classifying, induction and deduction, and evaluative
reasoning. Benjamin Bloom (1956) developed a classification system of levels of
intellectual behavior in learning. “This taxonomy contains three overlapping domains: the
cognitive, psychomotor, and affective. Within the cognitive domain, he identified six
levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. These
domains and levels are still useful today as we develop the critical thinking skills of our
students” (Eduscapes, 2007).