RE-EXAMINING BLOOM: ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNER STUDENTS IN FIRST GRADE DEVELOPING COGNITIVE ACADEMIC LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY

Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956) has guided intellectual behavior in education for decades, and its six levels of cognitive behavior– knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation have guided the development of learning and assessment objectives. Questions on standardized assessments, such as Florida’s Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) are correlated to cognitive behaviors addressed in Bloom’s taxonomy and teachers use it to develop lesson plans and assessment. However, when Bloom’s Taxonomy is purposefully built into teaching lessons, then it fills the gap between lesson objectives and assessment measures. This purposefulness provides English Language Learner (ELL) students with explicit and direct instruction in academic vocabulary, literal as well as critical reading skills and higher-order thinking skills.
In a first-grade elementary school in Sarasota, Florida the six levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy was purposefully infused into learning activities. The first grade class (N= 16 students) has three reading levels with more than one ELL student in each level. In addition to the base reader, students read various types of texts, such as plays, expository, and narrative texts. After the students became familiar reading a text, Bloom Taxonomy-infused questions and activities were introduced and students worked in groups to process the text critically. Taxonomy-infusion begins with introduction of taxonomy terminology using Bloom’s terminology followed by focused engagement with learning activities. In small groups, the teacher used the interactive white board (ActivBoard) as an integral teaching tool to facilitate learning in each lesson. The technology allowed the teacher to project a variety of visual texts with accompanying audio and electronic flip charts to teach each of the six levels within the texts. Students used the electronic flip charts to demonstrate understanding of the text associated with each of Bloom’s levels. Finally, using the interactive whiteboard flipchart technology, students were able to easily enhance and/or remediate their work and actively share with peers in cooperatively learning groups. Through this direct infusion of Bloom’s Taxonomy into lessons using the interactive white board technology, learning tasks that are cognitively demanding and those which are embedded in low-context language environments become accessible to ELL students who are working cooperatively and who are using high level vocabulary to solve higher order problems.
Bloom’s cognitive Taxonomy has guided intellectual behavior in education particularly in developing learning and assessment objectives; however, it is rarely purposefully infused into lessons to teach higher-order thinking skills. In this presentation the steps of Taxonomy infusion will be discussed to show how ELL students in a first grade classroom mastered the language of Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency and are developing higher level cognitive skills, in part using interactive white board technology. Samples of students’ work as well as video clips of the learners working with Taxonomy-infused activities will also be shared with participants.