Bloom’s Taxonomy, Explained

If you’ve ever written a training objective that says something like “understand our pricing model” or “know the key features,” you’ve written a bad objective. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s unmeasurable. How do you know if someone “understands” something? You can’t observe understanding. You can observe someone explaining it, comparing it, applying it, or catching an error in it.

This is the problem Benjamin Bloom and a team of researchers set out to fix in 1956. They built a framework, now called Bloom’s Taxonomy, that organizes thinking into levels, from simple recall up to complex judgment. The point isn’t to make you write fancier objectives. It’s to force you to decide what you actually want someone to be able to do, not just what you want them to “know.”

In enablement and customer education, this distinction is the difference between a course that feels thorough and a course that actually changes what someone can do. A rep who can recite your pricing tiers isn’t the same as a rep who can position pricing against a competitor on a live call. Bloom’s gives you the language to tell those two things apart before you build anything.

If you can’t observe someone doing it, you can’t claim they learned it.

Bloom’s original taxonomy has been revised since 1956, most notably by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl in 2001, who changed the levels from nouns to verbs, which is the version most people use today. The six levels, from lowest to highest:

Each level builds on the one below it. You can’t apply something you don’t understand, and you can’t evaluate something you can’t analyze.

Here’s the trap almost every course falls into. Remember and Understand are the easiest levels to teach and the easiest to test. You can write a slide that lists facts, and a quiz that asks someone to recall them, in about ten minutes. Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create all take more work, because they require giving someone a real situation to work through, not just information to absorb.

So most training stacks up at the bottom two levels without anyone deciding to put it there. It just happens, because that’s the path of least resistance. The result is a rep who can list your product’s features in a quiz but freezes when a prospect asks a comparison question, because comparison lives at Analyze, and nobody built anything at that level.

The fix isn’t to throw out Remember and Understand. You need them, they’re the foundation. The fix is to notice when that’s all you’ve built, and ask whether the actual job requires more. If the job requires judgment or problem solving, your training needs to reach Evaluate or Create, not stop at Remember.

Recall is the floor, not the finish line. Check where your course actually lands, not where you assumed it landed.

Once you know the six levels, writing a good objective gets a lot simpler. Pick the level that matches what the person actually needs to do on the job, then use a verb from that level. Not “understand,” not “know,” not “be familiar with.” Those are the verbs that let you avoid committing to a level, and they’re exactly the ones Bloom’s asks you to replace.

Start with the real job task. If a customer support rep needs to triage a ticket and decide whether to escalate it, that’s an Evaluate task, not a Remember task. So the objective should be “Given a sample ticket, recommend whether to escalate it and justify the decision,” not “Understand the escalation policy.” The second version sounds fine but tells you nothing about whether someone can actually do the job.

This is also a fast way to check your own course after you’ve built it. Pull up your learning objectives and your knowledge check questions side by side. If your objective says Apply but your quiz only asks someone to define a term, they don’t match, and your quiz is testing the wrong thing.

Match your verb to the real job, then make sure your quiz tests that same verb.