The 4 Categories of Learning.

Bloom’s Taxonomy and Spaced Repetition

Recently, I’ve been trying to refine my learning skills, mainly, how I absorb content and more importantly how to ensure what I’ve absorbed sticks.

Benjamin Bloom, an influential educational psychologist categorized knowledge into four areas, factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive (Anderson et al., 2000, chap. 3). Factual knowledge are hard facts like knowing names, dates, and terms. Conceptual knowledge are mental models; it is the understanding of something holistically, like how a food web functions to keep an ecosystem sustainable. Procedural knowledge is information on how to do something, how to fix a lightbulb or how to make breakfast every morning. Finally, there is Metacognitive, this one is unique as it doesn’t seem to fit with the other three since it focuses on reflective understanding rather than external information. Metacognitive knowledge is knowledge about your knowledge, it’s knowing what you know you have learned and knowing when you are lacking in something.

I’ve come to realize that while I easily retain conceptual knowledge and have strong metacognition, my factual knowledge is severely lacking. I have no trouble explaining what happened for some event, but if you asked me when this event took place or what were the names of the parties or people involved, I wouldn’t know at all.

One of the many ways to strengthen this area of factual knowledge retention is to use spaced repetition, I’ve started to use Anki along with an algorithm called FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler) to build a stronger knowledge base and to be more confident in what I know and what I don’t.

References

Anderson, L.W. et al. (2000) A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives, complete edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.