Bloom’s V SOLO

Bloom’s v SOLO
by P Thomas • Differentiation and Challenge

The use of assessment to inform teaching and learning is central to our understanding student learning. Without this understanding the challenge of enabling all of our students to make progress becomes all the harder. Accurate assessment therefore lies at the heart of outstanding practice.

When it comes to assessing student learning, Bloom’s Taxonomy is frequently used and is central to many aspects of our CPD. Increasingly, students are aware of the subtleties of Bloom’s and are comfortable in using it to demonstrate knowledge of a topic and then apply it to their daily life. However, Bloom himself has been quoted as saying that his handbook is “one of the most widely cited yet least read books in education”.
These are a brief summary of Bloom’s learning categories;
Knowledge – “involves the recall of specifics and universals, the recall of methods and processes, or the recall of a pattern, structure, or setting.”
Comprehension – “refers to a type of understanding or apprehension such that the individual knows what is being communicated and can make use of the material or idea being communicated without necessarily relating it to other material or seeing its fullest implications.”
Application – refers to the “use of abstractions in particular and concrete situations.”
Analysis – represents the “breakdown of a communication into its constituent elements or parts such that the relative hierarchy of ideas is made clear and/or the relations between ideas expressed are made explicit.”
Synthesis – involves the “putting together of elements and parts so as to form a whole.”
Evaluation – engenders “judgments about the value of material and methods for given purposes.”
Bloom’s Taxonomy was revised in 2000. Originally, the knowledge dimensions consisted of factual, conceptual and procedural knowledge. Later the met cognitive knowledge dimension was added and the nouns changed to verbs with the last two cognitive processes switched in the order.
Remember
Understand
Apply
Analyse
Evaluate
Create
Bloom's
Updated version (2000) of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Bloom’s has been criticised because it can seem to focus on regurgitating information. For example, a student can provide a surface-level answer to a difficult question, or a deep answer to a surface-level question? We must therefore, be careful in our use of Bloom’s in terms of enabling students to make progress in their learning. As practitioners we should consider whether there is a better method to help them understand and take their learning forwards?

A SOLO solution?
SOLO was created by John Biggs and Kevin Collis in 1982. SOLO, stands for the Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome, and is a means of classifying learning outcomes in terms of their complexity. Biggs states that ‘It enables us to assess students’ work in terms of its quality and not in terms of how many bits of this and of that they got right.’
SOLO sites five stages of “ascending structural complexity.” Those five stages are;
Pre-structural
– incompetence (they miss the point).
Uni-structural – one relevant aspect
Multi-structural – several relevant and independent aspects
Relational – integrated into a structure
Extended Abstract – generalized to new domain

SOLO Taxonomy

SOLO Taxonomy, but in a pyramid, so it looks a bit like Bloom’s!

Using SOLO taxonomy can give our students the chance to go deeper into the learning and provide teachers with the opportunity to assess that learning as they progress. John Hattie breaks SOLO down in to an easier way for students to understand so that they can to assess their own learning. Hattie suggests that teachers can use:
No Idea – equivalent to the pre-structural level.
One Idea – equivalent to the uni-structural level
Many Ideas – equivalent to the multi-structural level
Relate – equivalent to the relational level
Extend – equivalent to the extended abstract

Compared to Bloom’s taxonomy, many teachers find it comparatively easy to identify and categorise the SOLO levels and relate them to the ability of the students. Teachers could be encouraged to use the ‘plus one’ principle when choosing appropriate learning material for students. In this model, the teacher can aim to move the student one level higher in the taxonomy by appropriate choice of learning material and instructional sequencing.

Whatever you chose to use, remember, it is the progress that is made by the students that matters and not the systems that we use to get there.

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