Bloom’s taxonomy model at Texas A&M University

A short visit to the Second Life Virtual Texas A&M University (Aggieland) last night was quite informative and exciting to me, as I encountered a model block pile of the Bloom’s taxonomy of learning, teaching and assessing. This block was located in the northeast corner of the virtual campus. It demonstrates clearly how knowledge and cognitive progress accumulate in our mind. Knowledge can be divided into four levels: factual, conceptual, procedural and metacognitive, while the cognitive progress is composed with the six stages of remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating. A view from the knowledge dimension shows that remembering a fact can be exemplified with listing primary and secondary colors, and as the tier goes higher, evaluating a fact can be interpreted as checking the consistency of sources, so on so forth.
This model, including the examples for each block piece, can be used as an elicitation of further discussion by more advanced ESL learning students. They can be given a task of reflecting upon their own experience of learning, based on which they will identify the stages corresponding to those of the Bloom’s taxonomy model. Most important of all, the students may want to analyze why their knowledge or cognitive process stays at that level, and how, if possible, can they upgrade this knowledge to a higher level. This is very much a class of learning reflection taught in English, for which more possible resources can be found online for the students. For example, two resources at the Wikipedia websites are for further reading.
http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/index.php?title=Bloom%27s_Taxonomy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_Taxonomy

More wonderful experience
In my second visit to this place, I saw the person called Jim. He is in real life a faculty member and administrator at A&M. He and his friend spent more than two months creating the two islands of A&M campuses. He talked with me via ‘public voice’, and showed me how to add a landmark for a place. So, I learned that the landmark for Bloom’s taxonomy model is ‘Texas A&M University Second Life, 12th Man (157, 227, 26)’. And you are most welcome to visit this amazing model.