#reading #productivity

Six levels of thinking

Bloom's Revised Taxonomy. Created in 1950's by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom and his colleges. The three lower levels are basic levels of cognition, concrete thinking, memorisation and understanding. Three upper levels are higher order thinking skills, including abstract, critical and creative thinking.

Taxonomy is revised in 1990's by a group led by David Krathwohl and Loring Anderson, one of the original authors and co-student of Bloom. To make the model relevant.

Level 1 - Remember

List, define, know, tell

Memorising and remembering things. Involves a lot of rereading and rewriting. Rote learning and repeating. It leads to level one results, regurgitate. Listing, defining and stating facts. Becomes less useless in professional life. It is not very good to hold on to and retain the things that you learn.

Level 2 - Understand

Cite, describe, outline, ask

Interpret, Comprehend and understand what you learn rather than just repeatedly trying to memorise. Summarise the knowledge.

Level 3 - Apply

Organise, use, illustrate, act

Apply the knowledge trying to execute and use it. Implement theory into practice and solve simple problems.

Level 4 - Analyse

Examine, dissect, investigate, order

Higher order learning. Look for similarities and differences, analyse. Trying to deconstruct different concepts. Level 4 thinkers are naturally rare since it demands more effort. It is not that people are not able to think at this level, they just choose not to do so. Usually have engineering background. Selective and focused learning.

Level 5 - Evaluate

Compare, critique, recommend, test

It's all about judgement, analyse. Asking questions like why does it matter and why should i care. Almost any senior position requires to think at this level. Some of the techniques involves creating mind maps, teaching and answering questions. Not only practical implementation of knowledge but also thinking through different connections and relationships.

Level 6 - Create

Design, produce, imagine, invent

Creating a hypothesis. Create an answer for a knowledge gap. Less important for most of the people. Synthesise new and novel information from what you already know. Answer the unanswered questions.

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