Learning Science

How Bloom's taxonomy is built into every Unit

November 5, 2026 · 5 min read

Six kinds of thinking, climbed in order on evidence: what the revised taxonomy does inside an EdSutra Unit, from naming the parts to building your own.

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Every learning Unit in EdSutra is a machine you run, and every one of them is climbed the same way: six steps, each a different kind of thinking, each opened by what you showed at the step before. The steps are Bloom's taxonomy, the most widely used map of thinking skills in education. This article explains where the taxonomy comes from, what each step asks of a learner, and what the taxonomy does for a Unit beyond giving it a shape.

Where the taxonomy comes from

In 1956 a committee of university examiners led by Benjamin Bloom published a handbook that sorted educational goals in the cognitive domain into six classes, from knowledge at the bottom to evaluation at the top. Its purpose was practical: to give teachers and examiners a shared language for what a question or a task actually asks a student to do, so that a course does not test only recall while claiming to teach understanding.

In 2001 Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl, with a group of cognitive psychologists and curriculum specialists, published a revision. Two changes matter here. The six classes became verbs, because thinking is something a learner does: remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, create. And creating moved to the top, above evaluating, because producing something new draws on every other kind of thinking at once. EdSutra uses the revised order, with the British spelling of analyse.

Six kinds of thinking, one machine

Take the first Unit, How Machines Learn, where learners train the Cookie Sorter, a real classifier, on cookies they label themselves.

Remember. You meet the machine and name its parts: the training examples, the labels, the model, its prediction.
Understand. You explain, in your own words, what the sorter does with the examples and why its prediction changes when they do.
Apply. You train it on cookies you chose, then run it on cookies it has never seen, and keep the results.
Analyse. You compare its mistakes and trace them to a cause: it learned the colour of the cookies, not the chips, because the colour was an easier clue in the examples you gave it.
Evaluate. You judge when the sorter's answer can be trusted, and when a person should check, using the accuracy, precision and recall it reports rather than a feeling.
Create. In the Labs you build a classifier or a network of your own, run it, and improve it.

The first five steps happen inside the Unit. The sixth, Create, happens in the Labs, because building something of your own needs an open workbench rather than a guided simulation. A Unit that has a matching live Lab offers it as an optional last step.

Each step is earned

The steps open strictly in order. A step opens only when the one before it is done, and done means evidence, never a visit: the Unit's own Next button asks for something you did, such as a trained model, a prediction you recorded, or a cause you traced. Until it is in, the next step stays locked. Tap a locked step and it does not open; instead the step to do first glows, and Ada, the studio's companion, hops onto it and says so. A step that opens plays a short unlock in its own box, so the learner sees exactly what their evidence earned.

This is the part of the taxonomy that is easiest to lose. A list of six verbs on a lesson plan does not stop a learner from skipping to the end. A sequence that opens on evidence does.

What the taxonomy does for a Unit

Bloom's taxonomy is usually described by its uses: it classifies thinking skills, differentiates levels of skill, structures a learning sequence, links verbs to objectives, promotes higher-order thinking, and guides assessment. Here is what each of those means inside EdSutra.

Classifies thinking skills. The six steps are six kinds of thinking, from recalling to creating, in rising order. A learner always knows which kind they are being asked for.
Differentiates skill levels. Each step asks for a different kind of thinking, not more of the same. Running your own examples is not a harder version of naming the parts; it is a different act, and the Unit treats it as one.
Structures the learning sequence. The steps open in order, each on evidence from the one before, and the shared step bar at the top of every Unit shows where you are and what opens next.
Links verbs to objectives. Every Module's learning objectives are written with the taxonomy's verbs, one per level: define, explain, construct, identify, judge, design. Every Unit's own objectives are written the same way. The Module page lists them, so a parent or teacher can see what a Unit was planned to teach before the learner starts.
Promotes higher-order thinking. A Unit does not stop at remembering and understanding. It climbs to analysing the machine's mistakes and evaluating whether to trust it, and the Labs carry the learner on to creating.
Guides assessment. What a learner shows at each step is the check, planned against the Module's objectives. Each Module also ends with a short quiz, so there is a record of the whole as well as of each step.

Where it does not apply

A few Units are built differently on purpose, and it is worth saying so. AI Alphabet is a deck of the words AI people use; AI and Climate is a ledger of real numbers; the Word Hunt is a game; and each Module's quiz is a quiz. They have steps, but not the six-step climb. Every simulation Unit, which is to say nearly all of them, follows the climb exactly as described here.

For parents and teachers

If you want to see the taxonomy at work, open any Module page and read its Learning Objectives: six lines, one per level, each starting with its verb. Then open a Unit and look at the step bar across the top. The step that is open is the kind of thinking the learner is doing now. The steps still locked are the kinds they have not yet earned. When a learner finishes, the Unit's In real life card moves what they learned into everyday situations, which learning scientists call transfer, and which is the point of the climb.

Bloom, B. S. (Ed.), Engelhart, M. D., Furst, E. J., Hill, W. H., & Krathwohl, D. R. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. Handbook I: Cognitive domain. New York: David McKay.
Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (Eds.). (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Longman.
Krathwohl, D. R. (2002). A revision of Bloom's taxonomy: An overview. Theory Into Practice, 41(4), 212–218.