PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF BLOOM'S SIX LEVELS OF COGNITION: THE CREATIVITY PARADIGM

In 1956 Benjamin Bloom headed a group of educational psychologists who developed a classification of levels of intellectual behavior imperative in learning outcomes. The group discovered that most of the objectives of teachers could be grouped along the three major educational domains, which are, cognitive, affective and psychomotor. Much emphasis was laid on the cognitive domain of learning in the Handbook I of the Taxonomy. Bloom found that over 95% of the test questions students’ encounter require them to think only at the lowest possible level that is from the simple recall or recognition of facts, as the lowest level, through increasingly more complex and abstract mental levels, to the highest order which he called evaluation. Bloom in the company of other associates identified six levels within the cognitive domain which are: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Now a seventh level was discovered which Blooms’ followers called “Creativity”. Who needs creativity? We all do. It is the basis for originality and innovation. It is the plausible way of unraveling many problems. The mind of a child, according to the renowned British Empiricist – John Locke, is a “Tabula Rasa”. That is, a plain chalk board or writing pad. Experiences, according to the empiricists, are source of the ingenuity of knowledge attainable by man. This reveals the need, and importance of encouraging the development of the intelligent traits in a child through creativity. In other words the effective instructional method employable by the teacher should be that which triggers and encourages independent study. Pedagogical practice that fosters self-development in self-actualization and self-reliance should be emphasized. This is to enable the child have a belief in self-efficacy and ability for creative thoughts that would pave way for creativity. This paper has offered some suggestions on how to accomplish this on a small classroom scale, but there is no reason why the same ideas cannot be scaled to a much broader audience, such as an entire university. The concepts behind enhancing creativity are easily integrated in problem-based instruction resource-based learning, experiential learning, and collaborative learning. Creativity is given impetus in this work through the cognitive ability of the learner to bring together all the experiences from the previous six levels of cognition it is strengthened through the effective instructional method of the teacher in bringing out or creating new idea(s) or phenomena.