This is part of a continuing series where we recognize and pay tribute to the
thinkers and practitioners who laid the foundation for Process Education.

"What Bloom had to offer his students was a model of an inquiring scholar, someone who embraced the idea that education as a process was an effort to realize human potential, indeed, even more, it was an effort designed to make potential possible. Education was an exercise in optimism."

 ~Elliot W. Eisner, former student of Benjamin Bloom and author of The Enlightened Eye: Qualitative Inquiry and the Enhancement of Educational Practice (1991), Cognition and Curriculum Reconsidered, 2nd ed. (1994), The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs, 3rd ed. (1994) and The Kind of Schools We Need (1998).

Benjamin Bloom's work on the analysis and ordering of cognitive tasks, according to their complexity, was an effort to identify those skills required for students to meet educational objectives. This effort was not undertaken philosophically, but for the avowed purpose of making it possible for examiners to more accurately evaluate students and the success of teaching.

His work, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals, Handbook 1, The Cognitive Domain, is recognized, the world over, as perhaps the seminal text on cognitive skills in educational contexts. With its six levels of increasing cognitive complexity, Bloom's Taxonomy effectively provided a framework and foundation for analyzing educationally important cognitive skills that others, including Pacific Crest, have continued.

The Levels of Learner Performance (Faculty Guidebook 2.2.1: Bloom's Taxonomy -- Expanding its Meaning) is an expansion of Bloom's work and focuses specifically on bridging the gap between explicit educational objectives (Bloom) and help faculty prepare better-designed courses, achieve more student-centered implementation, and establish outcomes-oriented evaluation criteria.

Bloom's work also informs the Classification of Learning Skills for Educational Enrichment and Assessment that was developed over a ten-year period by teams of Process Educators. Though Bloom's work identified the Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor domains, the Classification of Learning Skills orders the domains as Cognitive, Social, Affective, and Psychomotor.

We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Dr. Benjamin Bloom and appreciate his passion for identifying how effective teaching and learning can be purposefully studied and understood. His work gave much-needed structure to a previously unplumbed area of educational scholarship.

We invite you to learn more about Benjamin Bloom by reading "Benjamin Bloom 1913-99" by Elliot W. Eisner. This online publication is available at: http://www.ibe.unesco.org/publications/ThinkersPdf/bloome.pdf and appeared in Prospects: the quarterly review of comparative education (Paris, UNESCO: International Bureau of Education), vol. XXX, no. 3, September 2000. ©UNESCO: International Bureau of Education, 2000.