Student tasks in text materials: What cognitive skills do they tap?

The committee of scholars and educators who executed the Text Materials Study1 compiled a number of specifications for text materials. Besides presenting information, text materials should give students practice in application of what they have learned, either in the real world or through operation upon symbolic problems. Problems posed in the text materials should call for realistic use of generalizations and should require students to determine what principles pertain and apply them. Text materials should give students opportunities to bring together concepts from different fields in dealing with a problem. These and other specifications of the Text Materials Study correspond in marked degree to the higher cognitive skills categories of Bloom's taxonomy.2 Bloom's taxonomy permits classification of cognitive skills into six hierarchically arranged categories: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Knowledge is at the bottom of the hierarchy; the remaining five categories collectively are the higher cognitive skills, each of the successive categories being above the preceding ones in the hierarchy. What levels of cognitive activity do text materials tap through the questions and suggested activities which they contain? Using categories of analysis drawn from Bloom's taxonomy, Parks3 examined publishers' tests accompanying certain high school textbooks in world history, United States history, government, economics, sociology, and psychology. He found that the great majority of the test items fell in the knowledge and comprehension categories, while only a scattering of items fell in the four highest categories of the taxonomy. Davis and Hunkins,4 likewise drawing on the taxonomy as the basis of their coding system, examined the questions associated with selected chapters in three fifth-grade social studies textbooks. Their findings resembled those of Parks. It is risky to extrapolate from these studies to the point of drawing conclusions about all of the text materials involved. Is it not possible that, while the test items Parks studied indeed DAVID TRACHTENBERG IS assistant superintendent for instruction, Enlarged City School District of the City of Middletown, New York.