Bloom’s taxonomy is an educational teaching tool which divides learning objectives into three domains and then even further into subdivisions, which start from the simplest learning processes or behaviors to the most complex. The first domain is the cognitive domain; it contains six levels, which revolve around knowledge, and the development of intellectual skills on a particular subject or topic. The six levels of the cognitive domain starting from the simplest to the most complex are knowledge (remembering), comprehension (understanding), application (applying), analysis (analyzing), evaluation (evaluating) and synthesis (creating). Research shows that students retain more information and are found to have a better understanding of the topic when they learn at the higher, more complex levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.
When participating in the Zombieland Survivor experience we were challenged and learned at all six levels of the cognitive domain. Each level is considered to be successive to the next meaning that one level must first be mastered in order to excel at the next. The first level, knowledge, is the ability to recall or recognize the information and ideas in the way they were learned and the second, understanding, is being able to comprehend or interpret the information based on your prior learning. Reading through the chapters and lecture slides allowed us the basic knowledge and comprehension of the materials we would need to learn for the class.
The last four levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy are where the zombieland survival experience helped aide in our learning of sociology. The third level, application, is being able to transfer and use the data to complete a problem or task with minimum direction. Weekly we were faced with different situations in creating a new post apocalyptic society, with the full understanding of how each concept worked we could apply the concepts to the problem we were facing that week. The theory by environment discussion is a good example of when we used this step because we had to apply the symbolic interaction theory to our new society and explain how social change was happening after the zombie apocalypse. It forced us to learn the sociological concepts more in depth rather than just memorizing their definition or who created the concept, we had to fully understand how the concepts worked in order to apply them to a new social situation and be able to know what affect it would have on our new society and the other members of it.
Analysis is the next level we were challenged at in the zombie land survival experience, it is the ability to make inferences and find evidence to support generalizations. A good example of when we did this was the religion discussion, we had to take our characters beliefs along with Marx, Durkheim, and Weber’s theories into considerations and determine whether our new society should have a religion and if so what that religion should be. This discussion helped us analyze how those three social theories could be applied to society and how they each would affect our society and its members.
The fifth level, evaluation, is judging or assessing on a basis of specific standards and criteria. The papers we wrote at the end of each section were a great way for us to evaluate what sociological concepts were the best to apply in certain situations and which theories best described our societies. Our second paper about the concepts of social change had us evaluate how each of the four concepts could be applied and what effect it would have when it was.
The last level, synthesis, is defined as the student originates, integrates, and combines ideas into a product, plan or proposal that is new to him or her. This is what we did throughout the entire semester