Blooming hell
In 1956 the educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom released a book that changed education, and curriculum design worldwide. He presented a taxonomy of educational objectives, aiming for a more holistic education for students. Bloom’s work, specifically his cognitive hierarchy, laid the foundation for a lot of educational reform. Bloom argued there are six levels of domain expertise, and his concern was that education systems at the time were rooted firmly on knowledge, the lowest level. Anyone who has ever had to memorize information for an exam would agree.
The objectives are a hierarchy showing your ability with a specific domain. Informally you can think of them like this…
- Knowledge — The ability to recite lists, rules, formulas, specific facts.
- Comprehension — The ability to understand the reasoning behind said rules/facts, and translate and re-state where necessary
- Application — The ability to apply acquired knowledge in new situations to produce solutions
- Analysis — The ability to recognize patterns, question reasoning, distinguish facts from inferences.
- Synthesis — The ability create new knowledge, methods, formulas, based analysis of problems.
- Evaluation The ability to create multiple solutions and select the most effective in a given situation
When I was a full time researcher in Computer Science education, this taxonomy helped me gauge the effectiveness of exams. At the time most programming exams focussed on knowledge (e.g. “how do you get the length of a string”), or the marking system rewarded rote-learning (e.g. “+5% for a for-loop, +15% for an if-statement”). Looking at exam with these objectives in mind helps highlight problems. It can be also very useful when interviewing candidates claiming to have expertise in an area.
These days the taxonomy helps me in other ways.
What level to work at
User Experience designers should see parallels here between the levels they are required to work at in a given project, and the level of knowledge they get to use. For example “Make this sign-up form usable” is usually just the application of a few rules, whereas “Help my business gain more customers” requires the ability to generate multiple ideas and evaluate which is most suitable for this challenge.
When working for clients I know I’m far more effective when working at the synthesis and analysis levels than when I’m lining up text boxes, and stacking radio buttons to make an already broken form a little less painful. My mentor John Wood used to call this type of work “painting the corpse”.
Tips ‘n’ tricks
Eoghan recently posted about his issues with lists that promise to make you a better designer. I agree with him. I have no problem with check lists that serve as a memory aid, but these are a different sort to what is usually seen online.
I have issues with the usual “X ways to do Y” style lists, because at best they offer primitive knowledge that people rote learn, turning them into drones who say “Use gradient for modern effect. Always center your layout. Always use sans-serif fonts. Red is a good call to action colour”. And at worst they’re just bullshit begging for a Digg.