bloom's taxonomy is really a high level studying strategy that i've never talked about on this
channel before but it's incredibly useful when it comes to learning and revising for your exams
you see most students will be memorizing the material for their exams but by just
memorizing there's no real thinking behind it so you're not really processing the information
therefore you're only storing it in their short-term memory rather than long-term memory but
by truly learning the material with the help of bloom's taxonomy you're processing the information
therefore you're learning it faster and you'll be able to recall it faster when it comes to the exam
and if you can reach the highest level of bloom's taxonomy if you can genuinely reach that level
then you'll easily get the highest grade in your exam i mean it's almost guaranteed and you'll see
why later on in the video and i go in far more depth into the process of efficiently learning
vast amounts of information in relatively short amount of time using super efficient
study methods and memorization techniques in the transformer grades in 30 days course
i launched a couple of months ago you can click on the link in the description for more information
so the original version of bloom's taxonomy was created in 1956 named after benjamin bloom who
was an american psychologist it was revised in 2001 and modified slightly so that's the model
we're gonna go through in this video so there are different levels of understanding from the lowest
level to the deepest level it goes remembering understanding applying analyzing evaluating and
creating and most students are able to get to the remembering understanding and implying stage but
only a small percent are able to go beyond that but it's those students that can really reach the
highest levels it's those students that are able to get the really incredibly high grades because
they understand the content on a far deeper level so let's go through each stage level one
remembering this is where you're able to recall facts and basic concepts it only requires rote
memorization and you don't really understand what you've just learned but you've just memorized it
sentence by sentence i would really avoid just understanding your content at this level because
it's very easy to forget what you've learned because you haven't really processed it
properly a perfect example of this was when i was 15 or 16 and i was studying for my french exam
it was a speaking exam so what i had to do was memorize about three paragraphs of french
i had written three paragraphs in fringe so it wasn't that much information to memorize but
i spent weeks literally weeks reading and reading and reading the free paragraphs to
try and memorize them and i remember it so clearly i was reading the three paragraphs over and over
but it just wasn't sinking in then sure enough the exam came around and i was given a grade
f and looking back it's quite obvious to me now what was happening but i
just didn't realize it at the time so i was reading the three paragraphs over and over
but i wasn't processing the information because the text was all in french so each word was just
a random bunch of letters put together and each word didn't really mean anything to me so i was
basically just memorizing random sounds so this is an example of just reaching the remembering stage
of bloom's taxonomy really wasn't good enough and i needed to reach at least the next level or two
level two understanding so at this level you're able to compare interpret and give descriptions
about what you've learned so you can memorize and repeat what you've learned but you can also talk
a bit about it too although you won't be able to discuss the topic in a massive amount of detail
this level requires a slightly deeper grasp of the concept so you can do things like explain why you
chose a particular method to solve a problem and really most students just stop here but if you're
looking for anything higher than b or c grades then you need to keep climbing to the next level
level 3 applying this is the third level where you're able to use the knowledge that you've
learned in your vision and you're able to use it in a different way to how you learned it so
if you have learned some information for the exam but then in the exam a slightly different question
is asked you can use that knowledge and kind of adapt it to the question you're able to answer the
question without being given explicit directions and i'm sure you've been in that situation where i
know i have where i get an exam question and at first it's like i have no idea how to answer that
but then the more you think about it you use knowledge that at first you didn't think was
applicable to that question but then you use that knowledge to answer that question also at level
three you're now able to write in a lot more detail about each topic you've gone past just
understanding the basics but you're beginning to understand it in more depth and so at this stage
you can write a relatively long assignment about pretty much anything where your understanding is
at level three this is a stage where you're really starting to understand the material a lot better
and for me personally i make sure that i'm at least on this level on everything that i study
and i achieve this in a very specific way i have a system in place that i use to ensure that i
understand all the content i need to know for the exam i have a video explaining how i do this using
a six step system that i created you can click on the pop-up banner to watch that video level four
analyzing on the fourth level this is where you're not only able to understand the topic
but you can kind of manipulate it and juggle it around so you're able to break down the material
that you're studying into different parts and you can explain how each part kind of links with one
another so an example question that requires the fourth level of understanding could be where the
question gives you an inaccurate result and you are asked to figure out where the error is and
what information was missing and what information is necessary to solve it or you were asked to look
at data and interpret it in terms of what it means when it isn't clear what the data shows level 5
evaluating evaluating is really about using your knowledge and understanding of a subject to make
your own judgments and critiques on some given information so you might be asked to review a
solution to a problem and critique it and offer your own opinion on how it could be done better
so with this level of understanding there is often no right or wrong answer it's more
opinion based so it really encourages you to think outside the box and come up with your own ideas
and as you can see it's completely different to the first level understanding where you're
literally just memorizing the material and it's different to levels 2 to level 4 because
in those levels you don't add any more information in level five you give your opinion you're adding
to the knowledge you're adding information that you already know level six creating now this is
the highest level of understanding it's where you understand the topic so well that you can
write assignments on the topics extremely easily you can just write and write and write because
your brain just keeps feeding you information also at this level is where a student is able
to use their existing knowledge and essentially come up with completely new ideas and concepts
so there's no one right solution here but students have to be able to justify
their choices it's actually incredibly difficult to do unless you really do truly understand the
topic i mean on a really deep level but even then it's still not that easy and that's what stops
so many students from reaching this level going from level one to level six okay so to get from
level one to level six when you're studying is you need to study smart you really need to be thinking
and processing what you're studying so you should be asking lots of questions asking why things
happen the way they do linking the new knowledge you've learned with information you already knew
it's really important that you're not just using rote learning so you're not just reading text in
a book over and over just hoping that it will stick because it might stick but then you're
only at level one maybe you might reach level two but really it's just an ineffective study method
so one way of understanding the information better is by simplifying and summarizing it so
when you're taking notes whether you're taking notes from your textbook or you're taking notes
from your lectures then you need to not just copy down the information word for word exactly
how it's written in the textbook or exactly how it's written or exactly how your lecturer just
explained it word for word a far more effective and smarter way of taking notes to force your
brain to process the information rather than just passively record it is to first simplify it as
much as you can so by simplifying the information you're making sure that you truly understand the
concept if you're not able to simplify it then the chances are you don't really understand it
on a deep level it's what the late theoretical physicist richard feynman taught you should be
able to break down and explain complex topics in very simple sentences using basic terminology if
you're unable to do this then there may be gaps in your knowledge so once you've simplified the
concept you then need to summarize it this is a couple of things it makes it easy to remember
for the exam obviously the less information there is to remember the easier it will be to remember
so by summarizing a long complicated concept into short one or two paragraphs of course it will be
easy to remember for the exam but also by putting the concept into your own words you're processing
that information you're making sure that you truly understand it when you're processing
the information and storing it in your long-term memory and this really is the difference between
passive learning and active learning you really need to study smart because studying hard just
often isn't enough i made two videos on how i study smarter not harder and another on how to
boost your grades in 24 hours you can click on either of the cards on the screen because it's
probably my most requested topic on this channel you guys are always asking me how to study smarter
rather than having to study for longer which is understandable you should always be working on
making your studying as efficient as possible so i'll see you over in one of those two videos