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Bloom’s vs SOLO Smackdown

Bloom’s (revised) Taxonomy is a useful way to describe the cognitive challenge level of any given activity, That is to say that Bloom’s is a useful checklist of different types of thinking in a hierarchy. It does not show progression within a task or in understanding a concept.

SOLO Taxonomy (Biggs & Collis 1982)

• SOLO stands for the Structure of Observed Learning outcomes

• Originally a way of assessing the quantity and quality of understanding demonstrated in an outcome

• More recent move towards using it as a constructivist framework (work by Pam Hook @hooked_on_think and Daren Mead @dkmead)

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The Alexandrine (prestructural)

• A form of verse

• Used in 17th Century French tragic drama

• 6 syllables , caesuric pause, 6 syllables per line

• Racine was a famous playwright

• Aristotlean rules – same place, one story, 24 hours

• Breaking these rules caused outrage

• Je le vis, je rougis, je pâlis à sa vue

Getting #SOLO brains on the table – a mystery?

pre structural

uni structural - display stage

multistructural - setting stage

Relational - sequencing and webbing

Extended abstract - reworking stage

Moving on map

References

BIGGS J and COLLIS K (1982) Evaluating the Quality of Learning: the SOLO taxonomy New York: Academic Press

David Leat & Adam Nichols (2000): Brains on the Table: Diagnostic and formative assessment through observation, Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 7:1, 103-121

Leat & Nichols, Scaffolding Children’s Thinking - doing Vygotsky in the classroom with National Curriculum assessment