Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Take Action: Verbs for Every Domain

Are Questions Framed by Ideas, or Ideas by Questions?

"All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called 'Facts'.  They are the brute beasts of the intilectual domain."
-Thomas Hobbes-

After a Huge Response to yesterday's Post, Light Up the Room With Higher Order Thinking I would like to share some more questioning, taxonomy and verb goodness that some readers pointed me toward, and that I found through some deeper research.  

Exploration of these other approaches can be very helpful in developing new questionoing.  As with anything, I don't believe there is any one perfect solution, but taking from several solutions, you will most likely find one that works best for your current situation.

I Realize that as educators, we often lean toward the Cognitive Domains, and do not as closely address the affective and psychomotor domains.  This exploration has been eye opening, and I hope it will be for you as well.

Quick Side-note:  Comparing Bloom's and Depth Of Knowledge
In my explorations today, I found a great graphic which demonstrates some of the similarities and differences between Bloom's Taxonomy and Depth Of Knowledge, which I described yesterday:

The full document by Debbie Perkins (2008) can be found here.

Marzanno's Taxonomy
Special thanks to Tricia Sabine from Edmodo, who shared this concept with me.  In my initial review (this is new to me), this seems to be a brilliant and very effective organization for teachers like myself in the arts, where students are asked to draw on knowledge from so many different content areas. 

Marzano's Taxonomy is organized into the following categories and categories as follows:
  1. Retrieval
    1. Recognizing
    2. Recalling
    3. Executing
  2. Comprehension
    1. Integrating
    2. Symbolizing
  3. Analysis
    1. Matching
    2. Classifying
    3. Analyzing Errors
    4. Generalizing
    5. Specifying
  4. Knowledge Utilization
    1. Decision-Making
    2. Problem Solving
    3. Experimenting
    4. Investigating

Here are some great resources related to Marzano's Taxonomy:

SOLO Taxonomy
First described by Kevin Collis and John Biggs in Evaluating the Quality of Learning:  The SOLO Taxonomy (New York: Academic Press, 1982), SOLO Stands for the Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome

This taxonomy is based on the quality of a student's learning and not the quantity.  While the language could use some updating, the concept behind the organization is very interesting, and is characterized by progression through a series of domains or understanding in this order:
  1. Pre-Structural: Does not understand the concept at all
  2. Unistructural: Similar to Blooms basic domains, able to identify parts and pieces of a concept
  3. Multistuctural:  Able to identify and describe many parts of a concept, but still very content based
  4. Relational:  Able to make connections between the many pieces and parts of a concept, making deep and meaningful connections
  5. Extended Abstract:  One step past Relational, with a focus on extension to different concepts or applications (I feel this in some ways goes just beyond Blooms and is very similar to DOK level 4)

Other Resources Related to SOLO:

Krathwohl's affective domain taxonomy:
Esseentially an extension of Blooms, but another great perspective.  "The taxonomy is ordered according to the principle of internalization. Internalization refers to the process whereby a person's affect toward an object passes from a general awareness level to a point where the affect is 'internalized' and consistently guides or controls the person's behavior (Seels & Glasgow, 1990, p. 28)."

In looking through this taxonomy, it seems it would be very useful in creating rubrics and focusing on student products.  This is a great tool for analysis of (as the name states) affective elements.
Resources Related to Krathwohl's:

Psychomotor Domains:
This taxonomy helps to describe student abilities in relation to psycho-motor skills, or connections between thinking and moving.  This is a domain with which I was not familiar, and as I have a large population of special needs scholars, now find incredibly useful in creating my learning targets and lesson plans.

Harrow's Taxonomy:
This taxonomy is an organization of student abilities ranging as follows:
  1. Reflex Movements:  Actions that are response to stimuli
  2. Basic Fundamental Movement:  Combinations of reflexive movements such as walking, twisting and grasping
  3. Perceptual:  Interpretation of stimuli and ability to make adjustments to environment, such as Visual, auditory, kinesthetic, or tactile discrimination (hello, artists and musicians!), coordinated movements such as jumping rope, punting, or catching
  4. Physical Activities:  Things that require serious exertion over a long period of time or short precise movements
  5. Skilled Movements:  Result from the acquisition of a degree of efficiency when performing a complex task. Examples are: all skilled activities obvious in sports, recreation, and dance.
  6. Non-discursive Communication:  Communication through bodily movements ranging from facial expressions through sophisticated choreographics. Examples include: body postures, gestures, and facial expressions efficiently executed in skilled dance movement and choreographics.

Resources Related to Harrow's:
Simpson's Taxonomy
Similar to Harrow's Taxonomy in structure, the domains of Simpson's are as follows:
  1. Perception
  2. Set
  3. Guided Response
  4. Mechanism
  5. Complex
  6. Adaptation/Organization

Moving Forward:
Although this is not a completely exhausted list, it is eye-opening to the different interpretations of very similar concepts.  I was not fully aware of the Psychomotor domains, and am intrigued at their applications within the arts and arts education.  They seem so closely linked to creating art, music, theater and dance that they really cannot be ignored.

I hope that these tools are helpful to you as well, and once again, keep the sharing up, I love to hear about where these posts take you, and in turn what they bring back to my students.

Keep working your way to the top of the Taxonomy!

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