BJU Press Blog

Bloom's taxonomy

Comprehending Comprehension

by

Comprehension

Many homeschool curricula claim to encourage comprehension in children, but what does it mean to comprehend something?

Comprehension is a group of skills that we use to relate language to meaning. The ability to comprehend takes place on four levels: literal (recognizing and remembering information); interpretive (receiving information from statements through analysis and synthesis; making inferences); critical (evaluating and making judgments about statements); and creative (appreciating and responding emotionally to statements). Taken together, these four levels make up total comprehension, which means that a child understands what he has read, even if he doesn’t know everything about it.

Essentially, this group of skills reveals Bloom’s taxonomy for the cognitive domain. (See “Applying Bloom’s Taxonomy” for more information on this topic.)

Does a curriculum emphasize “comprehension” by requiring a student to retain and repeat information or to pronounce words accurately? Or does it require the student to use information in real-life situations (application)? Break down information into a simpler form (analysis)? Put information together with other facts to form conclusions (synthesis)? Pass judgment on the validity of ideas (evaluation)? All of these activities make up total comprehension—relating language, the printed material on the page, to meaning.

Here’s a fun illustration of these levels of comprehension based on Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky.” Read the following lines from Carroll’s poem, and then consider the questions below.

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

  • What did the slithy toves do in the wabe?
  • Fill in the blank: The borogoves were _____.
  • What things were outgrabing?

If your child answers the questions correctly, has he comprehended the material? In the limited sense of literal comprehension, yes, because he has accurately retained and repeated the information.

To find out whether he can relate language to meaning in this case, you could ask different kinds of questions like the following:

  • How can you help someone be mimsy tomorrow? (application)
  • Explain how a tove becomes slithy. (analysis)
  • Which is better, outgrabing or gimbling? (evaluation)
  • Did the poem make you feel brillig? Why or why not? (appreciation)

Of course, the child cannot answer any of these questions (and neither can you!) because the nonsensical nature of the words makes it impossible to get beyond the level of literal comprehension.

You must decide whether the narrow or the broad approach to comprehension (literal versus total) supports your family’s philosophy of education. If you want your child to read eloquently at an early age, to memorize math facts, and to recite dates in history, then stress performance over understanding. This curriculum will reflect the narrow definition of comprehension—literal level only.

But if you want your child to know not only how to read but also what he is reading, to see the concepts as well as the facts in math, and to discern and apply the lessons of history, then stress understanding over performance. This curriculum will be designed with total comprehension as the goal.

By determining your family’s educational philosophy first and then examining the curricula available, you can more wisely choose the one that helps your family achieve the kind of education you are working for.

BJU Press textbooks strive to promote total comprehension in each child’s education. We want to encourage children to know not just how words relate to each other but to be able to interpret, evaluate, and respond to the ideas those words communicate.

Take a look inside our textbooks to get a better idea of how we encourage comprehension.

Applying Bloom’s Taxonomy

by

As parents, you want your children to succeed in every area of their lives, and as home educators, you especially want them to succeed in their education. A good way to visualize your goals for your children’s education is through Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Dr. Benjamin Bloom described what he believed to be the best processes for learning. Though he identified three different domains of learning, we are all most familiar with the cognitive domain, which has to do with knowledge. Understanding his process can help you to fulfill the greater purpose of education—education isn’t just about learning facts and figures. It’s a process that continuously encourages children to grow and think critically. Bloom’s Taxonomy verbalizes the process so that we can aim for a clearer goal in education—being able to master concepts so that we can create new concepts.

 

BloomsTax

Since the best way to learn something is to see it applied, here is Bloom’s process for the cognitive domain applied to learning nouns. (To keep it simple, we’ll focus on the rule that says nouns are words that refer to persons, places, or things.)

Level One: Knowledge/Remembering

The first level focuses on facts and recall. It has nothing to do with what the rule means, implies, or suggests, it only focuses on knowing what the rule says. Our rule is “Nouns are words that refer to persons, places, or things.”

Level Two: Comprehension/Understanding

Comprehension is one step beyond simple recall. It demonstrates that you not only know what the rule is word for word, but you also know what those words mean and you can put the rule into your own words to express the same concept. To understand the “noun as a person, place, or thing” rule, you have to know what a person is, what a place is, and so on. Putting the rule into my own words, I might say that people’s names, specific or general locations, and objects are all referred to with nouns.

Level Three: Application/Applying

Level three begins the step where textbook practices and exercises come in. Here we take our rule and look at something it applies to. That means taking a sample sentence and finding and labeling all the nouns, based on our rule.

For example, “Amy (person) wanted to move back to Scotland (place), but her aunt (person) didn’t have enough money (thing) for the move (thing).”

Level Four: Analysis/Analyzing

Analysis involves grouping information into parts. It’s a question-and-answer process that might reveal more about our rule. When I put the rule into my own words, I changed things to objects because I felt that objects better indicates the tangible nature of things. But in the example sentence above, I’ve identified the second move as a noun, not a verb. Why is it a noun and not a verb? When we’re analyzing, we need to recognize that some words may be nouns that refer to persons, places, or things even if they’re normally used as a different part of speech. While we’re thinking about it, we may notice that we can classify the second move as a noun, but not the first one.

Levels Five and Six: Evaluation/Evaluating and Synthesis/Creating

Originally, Bloom’s fifth level was synthesis, and his sixth was evaluation. But a group of Bloom’s former students revised his original process in the 1990s. Under the revised version, evaluating became the fifth level, and creating became the sixth.

Evaluating involves forming conclusions based on new and prior knowledge and being able to support those conclusions with that knowledge. Here we should be able to look at what we discovered in our analysis step and explain why we came to the conclusion that we did. In the example sentence above, we know that move usually indicates an action, like when we first used it, but the second time it’s used in a tangible, countable sense, not as an action.

This step marks the end of most forms of practice exercises in many textbooks. But we need to go on to the last level in order to demonstrate true knowledge of a concept.

The final level in the revised model is creating. Creating requires using all prior knowledge in order to form a new idea. It goes beyond reading a new sentence and identifying parts of speech. Creation demonstrating a mastery of nouns would require putting together a new sentence using nouns intentionally and naturally. For example, in the following sentence, I’ve created a situation to use words that would often act as verbs (love and traveling) as nouns in order to show what we discovered about things.

“Amy decided that her love of traveling was more important to her than her love of Scotland.”

Bloom’s process relies on a widening foundation of knowledge, and BJU Press homeschool curriculum references the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, especially in math and vocabulary. Check out our math curriculum or vocabulary curriculum to see how we do it!