An Analysis of the Formal Properties of Bloom's Taxonomy and Its Implications for Computing Education

Educational taxonomies provide conceptual frameworks to deal with different educational issues. In particular, Bloom's taxonomy is popular in CSE, especially in programming courses for assessment purposes. However, different authors have reported difficulties of use, and have even suggested as hypothetical cause an inherent deficiency of the taxonomy. In this paper, we present an analysis of the formal properties of the two versions of Bloom's taxonomy. According to their authors' intents, the original taxonomy should be considered a comparative system, while the revised taxonomy would be a classification system derived from the product of two simpler classifications. However, our analysis shows that, among other deficiencies, the taxonomies are ill-defined as classification systems. Two major implications of the analysis are: (a) that instructors' difficulties are primarily due to the taxonomies themselves, not to instructors, and (b) an identification of those features of the taxonomies that are deficient, and that therefore allow explaining the difficulties reported. Finally, we discuss some implications of these findings, both in general and for CSE, as well as possible future actions.