Retrieval Practice & Bloom’s Taxonomy: Do Students Need Fact Knowledge Before Higher Order Learning?
The title is a little misleading. This isn't about needing knowledge per se, but about what kinds of retrieval practice are more helpful for supporting higher order learning. Factual questions helped increase factual knowledge, but they didn't help higher order reasoning. Higher order retrieval practice (on its own or mixed with factual questions) resulted in better performance on the higher order reasoning. If we view this as practicing in context, then it makes sense that practicing skills of similar difficulty would produce better results. However, this is contrary to some of the research that factual knowledge has to be mastered first.
Although fact quizzes were beneficial for fact learning, they did not facilitate higher order learning, contrary to popular intuition based on Bloom’s taxonomy.
Contrary to popular intuition, building a foundation of factual knowledge via retrieval practice did not enhance students’ higher order learning. Instead, students’ final fact test and higher order test performance was greatest following retrieval practice that matched in cognitive complexity based on Bloom’s taxonomy: fact quizzes enhanced final fact test performance and higher order quizzes enhanced final higher order test performance. Retrieval practice increased learning by 20–30% under laboratory conditions with college students and also in an authentic K-12 classroom.
Why didn’t fact quizzes improve higher order learning in the present study, as many cognitive scientists and educators contend? First, students may have been unaware that information on fact quizzes was related to final higher order tests, thus they did not transfer their knowledge without explicit instructions to do so.
Mixed quizzes, comprising both fact and higher order questions, increased higher order test performance more than fact quizzes (in Experiment 2) and slightly more than higher order quizzes (in Experiment
If we want to reach the top of Bloom’s taxonomy, building a foundation of knowledge via fact-based retrieval practice may be less potent than engaging in higher order retrieval practice at the outset, a key finding for future research and classroom application.
