READING/WRITING AND CRITICAL THINKING

       Kinds of Critical Thinking: Bloom's Taxonomy

one of the most influential of the critical thinking models is Bloom's Taxonomy of Higher Thinking. Bloom categorized thinking into the following six processes:

• Knowledge
• Comprehension
• Application
• Analysis
• Synthesis
• Evaluation

According to Bloom, students must master one level of thinking before they can move on to the next. We can't expect our students to evaluate knowledge if we haven't first required them to understand it, apply it, and analyze it, and so on. Courses that employ critical thinking pedagogy take Bloom's theory into account, giving students practice in some of the "lower" critical thinking skills before moving them on to the more difficult tasks of the higher thinking processes.

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