Relieve the pressure on your lesson planning with eight ready-made, good-to-go application and analysis activities you can use to bring Bloom’s Taxonomy into your teaching today

Looking at Application and Analysis Activities

Here’s Bloom’s Taxonomy:

Level 1: Knowledge
Level 2: Comprehension
Level 3: Application
Level 4: Analysis
Level 5: Synthesis
Level 6: Evaluation

We’re going to look at levels three and four. Application and analysis.

I’ll share eight activities you can use in your lessons, four for each.

These are all good ways you can develop learning and push learners that little bit further along the path to mastery.

Application Activity 1: Novel Problem-Solving

Set learners the task of solving problems based on the topic but with which they are not familiar.

The lack of familiarity is key as it is this that causes learners to apply the knowledge and understanding they have gained.

If problems are familiar then learners may simply recall solutions, which does not serve to help them develop their understanding.

Remember that application comes after knowledge and comprehension.

It’s the next step on the path to mastery.

Novel problems – those learners have not seen before – require deeper engagement, potentially causing learners to do some analysis as well as some application.

A good approach to take here is to present a series of progressively more complex or unusual problems.

This creates a further sense of progression, with learners having to work harder to effectively apply what they know and understand to each subsequent problem.

Application Activity 2: Scenarios

A variation on the theme of problem-solving is that of scenarios.

These are a specific type of problem, usually connected to the real-world (albeit they might be imagined), in which learners must use their knowledge and understanding to work out the best way forward.

A simple example is: What would you do in this situation and why?

A more challenging example involves us giving learners an unfamiliar scenario containing a range of variables and asking them to apply their knowledge to this.

For example, we might be teaching about climate change and present learners with a case study looking at a developing country’s industrial policy before asking them to apply their knowledge of developing countries and of renewable energy to the problem of lowering the country’s emissions while maintaining economic growth.

Another example could be asking younger learners to apply their knowledge of how you add fractions together to a real-life scenario they have not encountered before:

‘Imagine you and your friends go trick or treating. Your bag ends up three quarters full, one of your friends has a bag that is half full, and another friend has a bag that is three-fifths full. How many full bags do you have in total?’

Application Activity 3: Explain What You Haven’t Seen Before

Ask learners to explain why certain things are the case.

These things should be connected to the lesson topic but should not be familiar to learners.

The aim is to create a situation in which learners are applying their knowledge and understanding to explain or demonstrate something.

For example, we might teach learners about the meaning of forgiveness in Christian theology before presenting them with a range of examples of Christian figures who chose to forgive or not to forgive.

We would then ask them to explain why each one of the figures made their choice and whether it fits with the theology.

This sees learners applying their understanding in search of an answer.

It goes beyond comprehension because of the novelty inherent to the situations learners are looking at.

This novelty means they are compelled to take their existing understanding (in this case, about Christian theology) and apply it to the situations with which they are faced.

Application Activity 4: Application, Live and Direct

As a final example, we may set up ‘live’ situations in which learners need to apply their understanding in order to proceed.

For example, in a PE lesson we might teach a skill and then move learners into a series of small-scale games in which they must try to apply that skill.

Or we might demonstrate a mathematical procedure before giving learners a selection of equations they must aim to solve by applying the procedure.

Or in a design and technology lesson we might show learners how to make a particular kind of joint and then ask them to apply what we’ve modelled in their own work.

These are examples of active practice, where learners gain a basic knowledge and understanding of something – in these cases a skill or procedure – which they then develop by seeking to apply it repeatedly in a short space of time.

We’ll turn now to analysis, which often overlaps or interweaves with application (and, on the other side of the taxonomy, evaluation as well).

Analysis Activity 1: Think Like a Detective

Present learners with something they must investigate or test.

This could be a hypothesis, a statement or a question.

If the latter, it should be sufficiently open to warrant sustained analysis.

Questions of this type are enquiry questions – in as much as they take learners into a period of enquiry.

You can structure the process of analysis encouraged by such an activity in multiple ways.

First, you can give learners a series of sub-questions they must answer as part of their work.

Second, you can divide the task up into separate subtasks and indicate that completing each one in turn will yield the results desired.

Third, by giving success criteria that illustrate how you want the analysis to take place.

This is particularly relevant if the investigation needs to mirror a certain method – such as is seen in the sciences.

You can make this approach more theatrical and engaging, especially for younger learners, by playing up the detective element.

Emphasise that investigations are the meat and drink of the detective and that learners will be taking on this role (you could even get a Sherlock-Holmes-style hat to wear as a visual signal that this type of activity is taking place).

Analysis Activity 2: Examine and Report

Ask learners to examine a particular thing and to produce a report detailing their findings.

There is a closeness between examination and investigation.

The former, however, is less directed than the latter and can be used in a wider variety of situations.

Consider how a doctor might examine a patient to see their present condition whereas they would be likely to investigate a specific complaint.

An example of examination is in English literature, where we might provide learners with a poem and ask them to examine its structure, the author’s use of imagery and the effect it has on the reader.

Here we are giving a structure to the examination by specifying the areas we believe to be of greatest importance.

We can increase the level of challenge by asking learners to decide themselves what they think the examination should focus on and to then justify this decision, before setting off on their work.

Analysis Activity 3: Can you see patterns?

Ask learners to work in pairs and provide them with material that is relevant to the topic – for example a selection of sources in history, some test results in chemistry or a collection of product designs in DT.

Explain that learners need to look at the range of things they have been given and, in so doing, identify any patterns, trends, similarities or differences.

This is a developed version of compare and contrast, with learners challenged through the provision of multiple items and multiple areas to look at.

The aim is to encourage the development of a nuanced understanding of the variations that might be present in relation to a given topic.

This helps to increase the depth and complexity of learners’ understanding.

For example, a Year 6 teacher might give learners a selection of maps as part of their work on geography.

They want learners to better understand the structure, nature and purpose of maps, so they ask the following questions:

What patterns can you see when you look at all the maps together?
What similarities do you notice between the maps?
What differences can you see?
What does all this tell you about how geographers make and use maps?

(I know that it’s cartographers who make maps … I’m just keeping it simple for the purposes of illustration.)

Analysis Activity 4: Research with Purpose

Provide learners with a research question and ask them to work individually or in groups to research this.

The question gives purpose and direction to what learners are going to be doing.

You can provide further direction by subdividing the research question into a series of three simpler questions.

This is helpful scaffolding for some learners, though it might make life too easy for more-able learners.

One of the risks of setting a research task is that learners get bogged down in trying to wade through an excess of information.

You can help them to avoid this by modelling at the start of the task how to narrow down your focus to effectively discriminate between what is useful and what is not.

This involves showing learners how to identify and then apply criteria connected to the research topic/question.

For example, whether a piece of information is directly or tangentially connected to the area of interest.

One option is to give learners a single criterion they can apply when deciding if something is relevant, for example:

Does this make it easier for me to answer one of the three research sub-questions?

Learners can then use this to sieve and weigh up the different pieces of information they encounter, helping them to discriminate more effectively.