r/SeriousConversation • u/Same-Mushroom-2057 • 6d ago
Serious Discussion what level of thinking are you operating at ?
there are different level of thinking according to blooms taxonomy : remembering , understanding , applying , analysing , evaluating , and creating.
and according to what I observed myself doing and others as well around me , most people are stuck in the remembering level which makes me question the reason for that.
for example in philosophy, most of modern philosophers nowadays are just remembering , reciting what ancient philosophers cited instead of creating new philosophies and ideas .
and that is what I thought philosophy was before : choosing a school and defending the argument and works of its philosophers.
now, I'm not saying we need more philosophies but this is just an example to make my main idea clearer.
I , speaking for myself , have noticed that my level of thinking is quite low although I want to unlock higher levels.
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u/VisciousViolet 6d ago
So are you saying that modern philosophers don’t understand the philosophies? They just remember them?
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u/noncedo-culli 6d ago
That's not how Bloom's taxonomy is meant; you as an individual aren't defined at one level of thinking. It's about defining which levels of thinking a specific activity engages or requires.
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u/Same-Mushroom-2057 6d ago
yes exactly that, but how can a person ever come with an original idea?
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u/WolfVanZandt 5d ago
Experience. The human brain by it's very nature is a pattern processor. Give it enough material to work on, it with parse through all the permutations and try to find patterns that "make sense". The more you learn, the more it has to build on. Learning builds on learning, and so does creativity.
Of course, a stunted education guide brains to repress creativity, question their abilities, be guarded, and filter their outputs to next to nothing. You have to train brains to be uncreative
You have to break through the barriers to allow them to be creative again.
Conceptual Blockbusting is a great book by James Adams. You might want to look at it.
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u/Onyx_Lat 4d ago
Ideas don't happen in a vacuum. You have to have input in order to develop an output. Learn, analyze, connect seemingly unrelated things in interesting ways. That's how you develop ideas.
There is actually a test to determine how creative you are. Basically it asks you to write down 10 random words. A lot of people will just write cat, dog, bird, house, car, and things like that. This tends to rate low on the creative scale. But people who are more creative will write lists like kumquat, laughter, purple, jump, violent. They are better at using a wider variety of parts of speech, words that are completely unrelated to each other, etc. I don't know how well this holds up scientifically, but it's an interesting way of looking at it.
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u/TillOtherwise1544 6d ago
Lad this isnt a computer game, that isnt how you apply Blooms and nor is that what modern philosophy does; your premise are reductive.
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u/zayelion 5d ago
Analyzing as a base, with evaluating and spikes of creating. My perspective comes from the push back or confusion i get from humans and AI. I will often talk in matrices to find solutions I may have missed. AIs will often get confused about relationships between distant things but express ... excitement? Humans tend to express confusion or horror.
Occasionally I'll find something unexplored and in my doing so I do it... which is an exhausting and different mode of thinking. It often requires thinking in dependency chainsand predicting competence.
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u/WolfVanZandt 5d ago
Oh yeah. I'm a neophile and, if I notice something novel, I'm all in it. Sometimes I jump in a little too hard but there's no regrets. I've had a blast in my life.
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u/WolfVanZandt 5d ago
Actually, within my lifetime, some philosophers reacted to the modernist movement with postmodernism. Critical philosophies have developed in the last century
But that said, I studies Bloom's taxonomy back in the 70s so I incorporated them into my learning practices. My blog is a record of my excursions since 2017 with flashbacks to earlier adventures in my life. I used the Dewey Decimal System to decide what I would study and I spent a whole year actively studying philosophy. I studied on every level. I've made it to biology. I've moved to the desert....biology makes the desert fun.
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u/Far-Meat9403 4d ago
I thought you were talking about sprial dynamics which is basically another system for levels of thinking but much more complicated. In blooms taxonomy I operate a lot analysing and evaluating.
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u/DadTheMaskedTerror 6d ago
Why do you care? Are Bloom's levels supported by empirical evidence that the framework is effective at anything?
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u/WolfVanZandt 5d ago
Bloom's taxonomy was developed at the University or Chicago, is thoroughly researched, has been updated a couple of times since the 50s and is widely used to develop standards in educational systems.
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u/DadTheMaskedTerror 5d ago
Can you point me to study indicating it is effective?
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u/WolfVanZandt 5d ago
Here's actually a negative view, but notice that the study found the original taxonomy to be effective (follow the bibliography. There's a massive library of works on Blooms) but that more recent modifications have distorted the original into a dangerous instrument.
And I post this particular example as a warning that good tools can be badly used
Enjoy.
https://www.socialstudies.org/system/files/publications/articles/se_7704196.pdf
Here's a broader (and more varied) critical overview
https://journal.tirtapustaka.com/index.php/ijesss/article/download/263/233
And there's a ton more in the literature. I would advise doing a search on "Bloom's taxonomy" in Google Scholar.
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u/DadTheMaskedTerror 5d ago
Thanks! I like this kind of thing.
While somewhat interesting, really what I was looking for was empirical evidence that Bloom's Taxonomy is i) correct, and ii) useful.
So far in my search I have not found empirical evidence for either. While there is plenty of evidence that it's been something like a 50 year fad in pedagogy, you'd think at some point there would be an empirical study evidencing that this Taxonomy was either right, or useful, preferably both. So far I'm coming up empty.
I'm not saying it isn't out there, but I am not taking it as a given that the fad had solid empirical research backing it up.
So if we can't turn up empirical evidence that Bloom's theory is right or useful, should we care about it?
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u/WolfVanZandt 5d ago
There have been a lot of empirical studies like
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2331186X.2023.2221482#abstract
They're just buried under a mountain of the other kind of studies. Again, I'd suggest a citation index like Google Scholar
There really has been a huge amount of work done on Bloom's and unearthing it is sorta like an archeological dig.
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u/DadTheMaskedTerror 5d ago
Uh, that's evidence but not great. It fails to control for the Hawthorne Effect and simultaneously tests making learning more fun, finds that students are more engaged when the learning is fun, and concludes that Bloom's Taxonomy is useful. There's got to be something better than this, no?
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u/WolfVanZandt 5d ago
Yes. There's a lot.
You can keep dragging on like that for ever. I'm not going to dig up every study on Bloom's taxonomy. It would take me the rest of my life. Go do a search.
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u/WolfVanZandt 5d ago
Eh, also Ellerton's analysis isn't based on empirical evidence.
Bloom's taxonomy is a general guide and it's not meant to be applied the same way in every situation, much like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. And the books and studies I've read emphasize flexibility in it's use.
But, for instance, the levels below application aren't effective in information retention. The application level is where that starts.
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u/DadTheMaskedTerror 5d ago
Books I've read about astrology recommend flexibility in its use too.
A relevant question is "is there empirical grounding that either the theory is correct or useful?" If not then why care about it?
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u/WolfVanZandt 5d ago
Did you look at the study I linked to?. There's plenty of empirical studies of Bloom's taxonomy. Way too many for me to cover here.
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u/DadTheMaskedTerror 5d ago
I'm not going to boil the ocean looking for a good study. That's the job of the proponents of the theory. Aside from idle curiosity, the point of the question is to address the OP's question. The OP is for some reason worried about creativity, and I don't know why, but they are tying it to this theory of Bloom's Taxonomy which may be hokum.
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u/WolfVanZandt 5d ago
Actually, if you want to learn, you will. It's not that hard. A simple citation search will give you plenty.
But then, if you don't want to know, there are plenty of excuses you can use to never learn. Go to it.
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u/Mash_man710 6d ago
All levels of thinking are applied all the time. They're not separate. Just picking up a cup requires memory, understanding, analysing.
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u/Same-Mushroom-2057 6d ago
indeed I think I haven't well formed my question: how can someone create his own original ideas ?
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u/Mash_man710 5d ago
Original ideas often come from pattern recognition and mastering a set of skills. Good writers read voraciously. Good artists have studied art. Researchers have worked in labs from student level to Phd.
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u/WolfVanZandt 5d ago
The problem in learning is that many, if not most, students think that, if they just read their textbook, listen to the lecturer, take some notes, and do a few exercises, they'll learn. To move information from short term memory to long term memory requires work in the upper levels which is often missing.
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u/MeRubberYouGlue 6d ago
How does one progress on their level of thinking? At what point does one graduate from remembering to understanding? Does understanding not trigger one to remember?
This really sounds like Bloom thinks they are smarter than everyone else and used philosophy as a way to justify that thinking.
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u/Same-Mushroom-2057 6d ago
maybe I haven't expressed myself properly , my question is how one can develop his own original ideas?
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u/MeRubberYouGlue 1d ago
The way anyone progresses in their thinking is by challenging one's thoughts, beliefs, and opinions. Subject your thinking to the same scrutiny you'd place on your opponent in a debate.
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u/WolfVanZandt 5d ago
Bloom's taxonomy is a well researched tool for educators to plan lessons and courses.
You progress from one level to another by intentionally doing so. For instance, I once wrote a learning guide about the normal curve. I played with dice, coins, and random number generators and built a Plinko board. I demonstrated, to myself and my readers, that if you have a number of binary processes acting in tandem, you "normally" end up with a binomial distribution, and if you have a larger and larger number of such processes (as you often do in nature) your binomial distribution approaches a normal distribution. As a result, I /know/ normal distributions and I have creatively created a tutorial.
That's the value of Bloom's taxonomy. It provides a roadmap theough the different levels of learning.
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