Developed by Benjamin Bloom in 1956, this uses 6 levels of learning to give structure to professional lessons.
Lower-Order Thinking Skills (LOTS):
- Remember: activate memory or background knowledge
- Understand: get meaning from lesson materials by discussion, summary, classification, inference, comparison, demonstration, and explanation.
- Apply: use a strategy to practice the lesson.
Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS):
- Analysis: break the material into pieces to see how they work together by organizing, contrasting, and attributing.
- Evaluate: check any results by critiquing based on certain criteria and learning standards.
- Create: make something new with the pieces that shows understanding.
A lesson doesn’t need to use all six levels. For example, a lesson could be an introduction, which may only include level 1 and 2. Below is a verb chart that can help design tasks associated with the levels.
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University of Arkansas This is a helpful chart of verbs associated with the taxonomy levels.
2026-04-16 20:40