On this page we will look at taxonomies by which we mean the taxonomies of learning outcomes. These have been created to help to map out and clarify different kinds of learning. The structure they provide can support you in thinking through your course goals and objectives, providing the basis for everything you plan for in your course, particularly the assessments.

Introduction to three common taxonomies

Taxonomies classify and differentiate between things such as knowledge and skills, or the different functions a learner can perform, ranging from listing individual concepts to being able to clarify relationships between them, all the way to being able to analyze and create knowledge.

Taxonomies are useful as guidelines when creating assessment tasks. Here we present three different taxonomies that are all popular in health sciences education:

Bloom's taxonomy
SOLO taxonomy
Miller's pyramid

This page will give you a basic understanding of these taxonomies. We start by giving an overview of these three taxonomies, after which we discuss possible reasons for having so many taxonomies.

Bloom's taxonomy

Bloom's taxonomy is a well-known taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessment. The full revised version includes a comprehensive account of cognitive functions that can be brought to bear on knowledge. For a simpler analysis, the six categories of Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyse, Evaluate and Create can be very useful.

This film What is Bloom's Digital Taxonomy? (4:51) from Common Sense Education published on YouTube will help you understand the levels of the Bloom's taxonomy. The first 2 minutes give you an overview of the levels.

Here is a good resource page on Bloom's taxonomy, with a brief description of the orginal version and the revised version: Vanderbilt Center of Teaching guide on Bloom's taxonomy

Solo taxonomy

Solo taxonomy is widely used at Karolinska Institutet. It was developed in conjunction with the model of constructive alignment. Solo taxonomy describes levels of complexity of understanding, from simple even irrelevant pieces of information, to being able to understand a phenomenon in a deep way, making it possible to apply knowledge to new areas. SOLO differentiates between four levels (or five if you include "prestructural"). This film from Karolinska Institutet (4:21min) gives an overview of the levels in the SOLO taxonomy:

Millers pyramid

Miller's pyramid (ref) differentiates between four levels of clinical competence: knowing clinical theory, knowing how to apply theory into practice, being able to demonstrate clinical skills, and being able to apply knowledge into practice in real work settings. As you watch the following tutorial, try to think about which levels of clinical competence are required from your students. Do your assessment methods measure those competences?

This film (2:14min) from John Mrozek published on Youtube under the heading Clinical Competence gives a good overview of the levels in the pyramid:

Why so many different taxonomies?

Learning is a broad area of human activity that can be looked at meaningfully from a number of perspectives and at differing levels of detail. The taxonomies described above give three possible alternatives for how to look at levels of learning, all of which are research-based. Pragmatically, the value of a taxonomy depends on how useful it is for the purpose it is being used for. For some tasks, one tool may be more useful than another. At times a more detailed categorization is needed, at other times a more parsimonious description works best. Sometimes two different tools work equally well for a particular purpose.

We have chosen to describe the three taxonomies of learning that are most commonly used in medical education without making any assumptions about which of them a particular program or teacher should use. We find them all informative.

Miller’s pyramid is very clearly and explicitly intended to describe the learning of clinical skills and competences. Most clinicians can probably recognize the different kinds of competence and can apply them both when writing learning outcomes as well as designing teaching and assessment tasks for their clinical courses.

SOLO taxonomy and Bloom’s revised taxonomy can be seen as partially overlapping. SOLO taxonomy was created in conjunction with the model of constructive alignment. The idea of constructive alignment is that intended learning outcomes, the tasks students perform when learning new things and assignment tasks should all encourage students to take a deep approach to learning. SOLO taxonomy may, indeed, be particularly useful when discussing the difference between “surface” and “deep" learning: Uni-structural and multi-structural levels of understanding are most likely the results of a more surface approach to learning than the more advanced relational and extended abstract levels of understanding, which would be associated with deeper processing of knowledge.

Several programs at Karolinska Institutet use SOLO taxonomy to indicate the level of understanding referred to in learning outcomes: “(S1) uni-structural, (S2) multi-structural, (S3) relational, and (S4) extended abstract.”

Bloom’s revised taxonomy is widely used worldwide. A large number of resources, examples and verb lists are available both online and in academic literature for a teacher interested in using Bloom’s revised taxonomy in course design. In its full form, the revised taxonomy includes even detailed analyses of procedural and metacognitive domains of learning.

A more detailed, academic analysis of how the three taxonomies relate to each other is beyond the scope of this short presentation. It would be possible, for example, to argue that Miller's first two stages, "Knows" and "Knows How" would best be described through SOLO or Blooms' , as they are all about describing, explaining and applying knowledge. Such an analysis would make for a full research article. We trust, however, that teachers and programs are capable of making smart choices about which taxonomy offers the most useful description of learning outcomes and best supports assessment in a particular context. Taxonomies are meant to be tools, feel free to choose the one that best fits the purpose!