Week Four

During this past week we learned about Bloom’s taxonomy and DOK and the difference between them. Bloom’s taxonomy is organized into six verbs that describe what we want our students to do and serves as a basis for learning objectives, questions, and activities. It is a framework that classifies learning based on different levels of cognitive rigor. Bloom’s taxonomy starts at the bottom with remembering, continuing up with understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and lastly creating. The order of cognitive skills ranging from simple to complex the higher you get the more of a challenge congenitally. Students start at the bottom of the pyramid and much master the lower concepts before they can continue up the hierarchy. 

DOK differs since it only has four sections instead of six. This is a model to analyze how deeply students are thinking to answer questions rather than a framework. Students are able to move fluidly throughout all the stages rather than having to master one skill in order to advance to the next one. I find it focuses more on the activities you can do within the sections and how the students knowledge allows them to complete these steps compared to the students having to master sections in order to move on to the next. In future instruction Bloom’s taxonomy can be used to make sure students work is fitting into each level. We can use this framework to see what type of thinking and reasoning we want our students to know and apply at the beginning of a lesson compared to the end. With DOK I feel like the first three steps would be the most useful during lessons where the students can answer questions. The last level would best work for test like questions and assessments or projects.