Allow your education to Bloom

Allow your education to Bloom

Between 1949 and 1956, Benjamin Bloom developed his famous taxonomy which revolutionised how students learn and teachers teach, by placing cognitive skills in hierarchical order. Broken down into six steps – remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, and create – Bloom’s order stresses that higher order skills can only be learnt once lower-order stages are completed.

Often referred to as the ‘pyramid of learning’, this concept will be a familiar launching point for those exploring different learning avenues; despite being an older model, it maintains relevance in the age of online learning, from lesson planning to self-assessments.

Taxonomy doesn’t have to be taxing

Taking their cue from Bloom’s model, the LSBF academic team have devised their own pedagogical philosophy – ‘Bits’. As the name suggests, the modular framework was designed with your e-learning environment in mind.

With a growing reliance on digital materials in contemporary education, Bits was conceived for generations of tech-savvy students, with an emphasis on knowledge acquisition. As Bloom’s model highlights, the most basic step in learning a new skill is to retain essential information on the subject. Your working memory is limited in what it can hold, which often means that drawn-out oral lectures result in information overload; add to this a trend for shrinking attention spans in the age of viral videos, and the impetus leans toward snappy content.

In the creation of their model, they employed the strategic principal known as ‘chunking’. This involves grouping familiar sets of data into larger groups in order to aid memory retention.

Bite-size chunks

Bits uses a framework which intentionally limits the scope of units in order to assist in the retention of information. The segments of each module are designed to be updated quickly and easily, as and when required – their delivery through digital media means that this can be implemented with minimal hassle, and not affect the whole module.

When creating Bits, the team identified five core principles of learning which need to be addressed for the lesson to be a success:

• Keeping your attention is critical to optimising memory, and therefore retention;

• Similarly, distraction is to be avoided, therefore the design should enhance – not detract from – the study process;

• Ensuring regular practice, such as summarising the acquired information, is an essential step in moving the information to your long-term memory;

• Producing easily digestible content allows you to better absorb information in order to satisfactorily progress to the next step;

• By activating long-term memory alongside the delivery of new information, the associations you make will help to reinforce recall.

Because effective learning is so intimately linked to your memory, and how you retain information, the learning process must be designed to maximise the efficiency of knowledge acquisition. Therefore, the teaching methodology used by LSBF seeks to bring together unique and memorable content, engaging teaching styles, in-depth programme monitoring, and ongoing professional development through versatile digital platforms, confident that it is a powerful catalyst for behavioural change in a professional environment.

You can discover the ways LSBF has made ‘chunking’ and learning more accessible, whether you use our Global MBA to reach your entrepreneurial dreams, follow the money with our MA Finance and Investment and Dual MA and MSc Finance and Investment programmes, or study our Dual MA and MSc Strategic Marketing programme to refine the way you plan your campaigns.