Mapping SAMR to Bloom's Taxonomy? No can do!

by John R. Walkup, Ph.D.

My first blog in Cognitive Rigor to the Core! dealt with misguided attempts to map Bloom's Taxonomy to Depth of Knowledge. In it, I explained the folly in trying to find shortcuts to understanding by resorting to such forms of backward engineering. I consider such a practice intellectually lazy.

Unfortunately, the educational community's quest to unwisely map the old to the new continues.

I wrote about SAMR in a previous blog posting, where I provided a method and tools for measuring levels of education technology implementation during live classroom sessions.

Mappings between SAMR and Bloom's Revised Taxonomy have now surfaced. One such mapping, typical of most, is shown above, where I have overlaid the traditional red bar and circle to discourage unintended replication.

This chart implies that when teachers employ education technology at the Substitution level, the best their students can hope to exercise resides at the Remember and Understand levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. On the flip side, education technology usage at the Redefinition level will promote the Evaluate or Create levels of Bloom's Taxonomy.

Nonsense.

The manner in which an education technology replaces traditional tools has nothing to do with the cognition used by students experiencing the technology. As such, any attempt to correlate SAMR to Bloom's Taxonomy will ultimately fail.

In short, one has nothing to do with the other.

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Seeking training at your school or district centered on Cognitive Rigor or Depth of Knowledge?  Call me at (559) 903-4014 or email me at jwalkup@standardsco.com. 

We will discuss ways in which I can help boost student engagement and deep thinking in your classrooms. I offer workshops, follow-up classroom observation/coaching, and curriculum analysis to anywhere in the country (and even internationally).