The first two years of college are vocabulary lessons.
The second two years are spent learning who to ask and where to look it up.--Bill Austin
Unfortunately, much of the experience of the typical college student (most definitely mine!) is as depicted above. Just knowing facts is not enough, especially in the current age when any fact is at the touch of a button. True learning, higher learning, comes from your ability to use these facts in new and different ways.
The process by which you are aware of your own thinking and learning is called metacognition.
The different levels of learning have been categorized by many people, but one of most definitive models was developed by Benjamin Bloom and his associates (Bloom & Krathwohl, 1956). In this work, they broke learning down into three domains:
In this class, we will be focusing on the first domain, the cognitive.
This work also first described what has commonly become known Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Blooms taxonomy categorizes various levels of intellectual behavior important in learning. This work has been updated slightly, and its current form is presented in the figure below:
| Remembering: Recall data or information. | Examples: Recite a poem. Know safety procedures and apply them in specific situations. Recite all twenty amino acids | Key Words: arrange, define, describe, duplicate, identify, know, labels, lists, match, memorize, name, outline, order, recall, recognize, relate, recall, repeat, reproduce, select, state. |
| Understanding: Understand the meaning, translation, interpolation, and interpretation of instructions and problems. Restate a problem or a situation in one's own words. | Examples: Explain in one's own words the steps involved in the how Meselson and Stahl determined that DNA replication was semi-conservative. Classify a species of mouse in the Class Mammalia. Translate a Russian document into English. | Key Words: classify, comprehend, convert, defend, describe, discuss, distinguish, estimate, explain, express, extend, generalize, give examples, identify, indicate, infer, interpret, locate, paraphrase, recognize, report, restate, review, rewrite, summarize, translate |
| Applying: Apply what was previously learned in novel situations elsewhere. Use a concept in a new situation or unprompted use of an abstraction. | Examples: Use the tax form instructions to figure out your taxes. Apply laws of probability to determine the likelihood of a given event. | Key Words: apply, change, choose, compute, construct, demonstrate, dramatize, employ, illustrate, interpret, manipulate, modify, operate, predict, prepare, produce, relate, schedule, sketch, show, solve, use, write. |
| Analyzing: Break down material or concepts into component parts so that the overall structure and/or purpose can be identified and understood. Distinguish between facts and inferences. | Examples: Recognize logical fallacies in reasoning. Gather information about the many safety violations in a laboratory and prioritize them with most serious offenses first. | Key Words: analyze, appraise, break down, calculate, categorize, compare, contrast, criticize, deconstruct, differentiate, discriminate, distinguish, examine, experiment, infer, question, relates, test. |
| Evaluating: Make judgments about the value of ideas or materials through checking and critiquing. | Examples: Select the most effective solution to a problem. Hire the most qualified candidate. Choose the best gift to give your significant other to apologize for that bad thing you did. Explain and justify your knew budget. | Key Words: appraise, argue, assess, choose, compare, conclude, criticize, critique, defend, discriminate, evaluate, justify, judge, predict, rate, relate, select, summarize, support, value. |
Creating: Builds a structure or pattern from diverse elements. Put parts together to form a whole, with emphasis on creating a new meaning or structure. |
Examples: Write a company operations or process manual. Design a machine to perform a specific task. Integrates training from several sources to solve a problem. Revise a procedure or modify a machine to improve the outcome. | Key Words: assemble, combines, compose, construct, create, devise, design, generate, manage, modify, organize, plan, prepare, propose, relate, reorganize, rewrite, write. |
Please note that the "Key Words" proposed are just suggestions of words typically associated with exercises correlated to a particular level of understanding. They provide estimates of starting points for analyzing the level of a particular exercise but the presence of one of these words does not automatically mean that the exercise is operating at this level - this type of low-level thinking is just what we are trying to avoid!!!
Bloom’s Taxonomy is arranged in a hierarchy, and much debate has been given to which level is above which, but we can simplify this into lower-order learning and higher-order learning.
Traditional education, including how I was taught, has often largely focused upon lower-order learning. Our goal in this clas, however, is to focus on
This is a science class, and one of the primary functions of science is to analyze the natural world and synthesize models to explain natural phenomena. These are all higher-order functions and mastery of these functions can only be gained by practice. We hope that by learning about Bloom's taxonomy of knowledge, you will be in a position to more readily reach these higher levels of learning in your studies of Biology in particular and the sciences in general.
That doesn’t mean that lower-order learning is undesirable. Facts and factual recall are the foundation upon which the higher-order functions are built! We are going to be assuming that you are picking up the base knowledge from your readings in the textbook and hopefully bringing this knowledge to lecture where it can be utilized!
Most of you are going on to do further work in either Grad School or Medical/Pharmacy school. While all of these professions require factual knowledge, the age of being considered smart and useful because you have high factual recall are over. The measure of success today is not what you know, it is what you can do with that knowledge. Science and medicine require higher-order functions such as analysis to be successful, so you had better learn it here.
Additionally, there is a myth that the MCAT and GRE exams typically ask factual recall questions. Detalied analyses have been done on these exams, along with intro biology classes and exams given during the first year of medical school. These analyses have shown that the GRE and the MCAT test the student at a much higher level than previously thougth (Zheng, Lawhorn, and Freeman, 2008). There has been a push to make the MCAT focus even more on higher-order functions - the importance of learning how to think on these levels cannot be understated!
- Winston Churchill
Image modified from http://isenet.ning.com/photo/1194706:Photo:16224 |
In discussion and lab, you and your lab group are going to have to perform a series of exercises in which you are going to have to work together. The purpose of this is many-fold:
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Literature Cited:
Bloom, Benjamin S. & David R. Krathwohl. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals, by a committee of college and university examiners. Handbook 1: Cognitive domain. New York , Longmans.
Dees, R. L., 1991. The role of cooperative learning in increasing problem-solving ability in college remedial course. Journal of Research in Mathematics Education 22:409-421.
Deutsch, M. 1949. An experimental study of the effects of cooperation and competition upon group process. Human Relations 2:199-231
Fagan, A. P., C.H. Crouch, and E. Mazur. 2002. peer instruction: Results from a range of classrooms. Physics Teacher 40:206-209.
Zheng, A. P., Lawhorn, J. K., & Freeman, S. Application of Bloom's taxonomy debunks the "MCAT Myth." Science 319: 414-15
