Using Bloom’s Taxonomy to evaluate mastery in the workplace
One of the key reasons why organisations should care about their learning infrastructure is that, when they get it right, it solves many employee satisfaction issues and can actively plug skills gaps internally. You may also be interested in Learning Experience (LX) as an experience design practitioner because experience disciplines support one another and are better when considered together.
I am personally invested in helping organisations to develop learning infrastructures because I believe in equality of opportunity, and when organisations create a curriculum to teach the hard and behavioural skills they ask their people to demonstrate, they have to determine how to measure if people have learned those skills. This keeps organisations honest about whether they are actually rewarding people on achieving mastery, or if they are promoting people based on popularity, as well as if the skills they require are learnable (and therefore achievable). Essentially it means organisations need to be transparent about what they reward and they have to pay attention to real versus perceived progress.
Determining what you need people to learn involves a task and skills audit, something I do with clients who want to implement a learning infrastructure but don’t have a clear list of skills they need people to learn. Assuming you are clear about what you want people to know, Bloom’s Taxonomy is a tool you can use to start thinking about whether you are explaining what people need to do to prove they have learned a required skill. It was designed by the educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom to help educators clarify their learning objectives, as well as offering ways to determine levels of compression. It asks educators to use action verbs instead of non-specific terms such as ‘we need you to understand this’, instead saying ‘we need you to interpret, classify, summarise, compare’ etc. These actions are all measurable, whereas ‘understand’ is too vague to measure.
Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching has created the diagram below to show an adapted version of the taxonomy, with ‘remember’ being the first level of understanding and ‘create’ being the most advanced. It also shows the action verbs you can use to clarify what you are measuring in each step. For example, if you want people to ‘apply’ what they have learned you can measure them on how they execute, implement, solve, use, demonstrate, interpret, operate, schedule or sketch. If you just want them to ‘remember’ something, you can measure them on if they can define, duplicate, list, memorise, repeat or state what they have learned. You get the gist. Educators still need to put a measurement framework in place with clearer criteria, but there is more specificity around what you are measuring, if not how.
To find out more about Bloom’s Taxonomy, read this helpful article by Patricia Armstrong from Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching.
Although not every leader needs to be a learning designer, I think it is helpful for leaders to be clear about what they need from their people and how they are measuring their growing mastery. This is just one tool of many that may help to get you started.
