Redefining the Blooms Taxonomy - Developing a Framework for Cognitive Competence Acquisition

The Blooms Taxonomy, which encapsulates learning in the cognitive, psychomotor and the affective domain, has historically defined the development of learning outcomes in the teaching and learning process. However, despite the continued use of the Blooms Taxonomy as the underpinning model for developing learning outcomes and formulating assessments, little emphasis has been placed on revising the Blooms Taxonomy to integrate the dynamics of competence development and acquisition. This undergirds the importance of revisiting the Blooms Taxonomy with the aim of developing a new model that defines competence acquisition in the cognitive domain. Adopting an experimental design, this research aims at developing a Taxonomy framework for competence acquisition in the cognitive domain. The control group for the experiment was 20 business studies students who had been taught leadership theories using the conventional Bloom's Taxonomy of learning while the experimental group was 20 students from the Instructor Training department at Kenya School of TVET with no prior training on leadership theories. The control group was given a cognitive test that utilized the use of higher order thinking verbs as outlined in the Bloom’s Taxonomy and was required to propose ways of improving employee motivation at the workplace from a leadership perspective. On the other hand, the experimental group was exposed to a Problem Based Learning (PBL) model in which a case study on leadership was presented, and the students were required to explain ways of solving the identified leadership problems. All the proposed recommendations from both the control and the experimental groups were listed as Likert type questionnaire items and presented to both groups for ranking. Results from the statistical analysis indicate that leadership recommendations proposed by the experimental group were highly ranked and had a high frequency count. Based on the outcomes of the study, the Cyclic Taxonomy of Cognitive Learning (CTCL) is proposed which is based on the philosophy that competence acquisition does not only follow the linear, sequential progression as outlined in the Bloom's Taxonomy but also happens in a cyclic manner with interoperability occurring between action verbs and knowledge categories.