We have all been taught about Benjamin Bloom's 1956 revolutionary idea regarding the hierarchy of thinking tasks in terms of abstraction and complexity, however, some ambiguity might leave teachers confused as to how these concepts actually work in the classroom!
Analysis and Evaluation – what's the difference? Though these terms are commonplace, and most of us feel like we possess an innate understanding of their differentiation, what really is the fundamental difference between analyzing and evaluating something? The word *value* is embedded in evaluating; when we evaluate something we are assessing it's value on some sort of metric. For example, if asked you to analyze someone's outfit, you might point out the colour and style of their T-shirt and pants, the accessories they are wearing, etc. However, if I asked you to EVALUATE someone's outfit, you would try to place it on some sort of scale from bad outfit to good outfit.
Overlap between Understanding and Analyzing These two ranks in the pyramid are important to highlight because they are very similar to one another. Analyzing requires a strong understanding, however it also requires some sort of *direction*. If understanding is to extract meaning from a body of text, then analyzing is to extract that meaning with the purpose of accomplishing something higher. Keep this in mind; if you want students to use their higher order thinking skills to analyze something, try and prompt this by having them argue for or against something, identify conflicting elements or gather evidence of something with respect to the piece of writing.
Posted by: ConorQ@NU-OTECC
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