When thinking of student learning outcomes, Bloom’s Taxonomy is the widely used framework, that faculty use to help write them.  While it is the standard, there is another type of taxonomy that faculty could also use to further customize the student learning experience.  This model is called Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning.

Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning is a course design model developed in 2003 by Dr. L. Dee Fink. It seeks to design courses around gaining foundational knowledge and achieving specific learning goals that students will remember beyond the end of the semester. By implementing it, instructors can better guide students to retain the core elements of their course after they complete it.

What Does Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning Look Like?

When describing significant learning, Fink states it is “learning that actually changed how a student lived his or her personal, social, civic, or professional life” (Intentional College Teaching (ICT), 2023, para. 1). Fink developed this design model to encourage students to take what they learn in their college courses and be able to meaningfully apply it to their everyday lives.

By using this design model, faculty can utilize the following areas to ensure students are achieving the goals set for them:

• Foundational knowledge: Understanding and remembering information
• Application: Skills, critical, creative, and practical thinking
• Integration: Connecting ideas, people, and aspects of life
• Human Dimension: Learning about others and oneself
• Caring: Developing new feelings, interests, and values
• Learning how to learn: becoming a better student, inquiring about a subject, self-directing learners

When all the above categories synergize, students will have a significant learning experience. To achieve this, consider the following questions: What does “significant learning” look like for your course? What is your dream goal for students taking this course? After answering these questions, write learning objectives around these goals and develop course assessments that evaluate said goals.

“Educators who seek to adopt a comprehensive approach to their courses are encouraged to engage with Fink’s dimensions of significant learning. By aligning course objectives, activities, and assessments with the dimensions of Fink’s taxonomy, educators can provide a rich and engaging learning experience for students” (Dabney & Eid, 2023, p. 6).

What Makes Fink’s Taxonomy Different From Bloom’s Taxonomy

Where Bloom’s Taxonomy covers Foundational Knowledge and Application, a common critique is that it does not cover the “human” element. This is where Fink’s taxonomy expands upon it. For students to have a significant learning experience, they not only need a solid base of understanding, but a real-life application and a chance to internalize what they have learned. Bloom’s also does not assist students in “learning how to learn” in the way Fink’s taxonomy does. On Bloom’s taxonomy, Fink says, “I found that many of the kinds of learning that students identified as being significant did not fit easily into Bloom’s Taxonomy, even if one refers to all three of his domains of learning” (ICT, 2023, para. 1).

Implementing Fink’s Taxonomy Into a Course

According to Carolyn Fallahi (2023), an Associate Professor of Psychology, when developing (or redeveloping) a course around FSL, there are four goals to consider:

• Less focus on Foundational Knowledge: “Instead of trying to cover every possible topic, I started incorporating basic concepts that I felt every student should understand. I stopped worrying about covering all possible topics” (para. 5). By choosing to focus on the “big picture” concepts, instructors avoid becoming too broad. Though this may be acceptable in entry-level courses, higher-level courses can suffer from becoming a mile wide and only an inch deep. Choose around three overall concepts and explore those thoroughly.
• More focus on Active Learning: Active learning can take many forms, but lectures and textbook readings are rarely active for the student. Find opportunities to step away from traditional lectures and toward activities that involve and energize students. The type of activities may vary depending on the content of the course, but by incorporating active learning exercises into a course, students are more likely to retain the lesson.
• Apply what you learn to real-world issues: The goal of college courses is to prepare students for a career in their chosen field. If a student does not understand how the content they’re learning in class applies to the “real” world, they may not feel motivated to engage or retain the information they learn. Fallahi avoids this by finding case studies that illustrate the concepts she is exploring in-class (para. 7). Besides case studies, discussing recent news related to the topic can highlight how applicable the content of a class is to a student’s life.
• Make course lessons into life lessons: To build on the previous point, not only is it helpful to show students how lessons apply to their future careers, but how they apply to their lives right now. Think of questions for students to reflect on across the course that relate to the overall core ideas and their application. Invite students to discuss their answers, in small groups if the class is too large to allow everyone to speak. Giving the students a relevant lesson they can immediately apply to their personal lives makes that lesson more significant to them.

By streamlining the amount of base knowledge, instructors can focus on teaching their students how to apply what they know to their careers or personal lives. By engaging the students through active learning assignments, they will have more hands-on experience with the subject matter than they would get through a traditional lecture-based assignment. By applying it to real-world issues and life lessons, students will have a more personal example to take with them, which will help them internalize the lesson. The more an instructor focuses on ensuring the learning experience is significant, the more their students will benefit from the course overall.

Whether you are suing Bloom’s taxonomy or Fink’s Taxonomy to write your student learning outcomes, the SCSU Online and Distance Learning  team can help.  We can provide explanations, more literature, and answer your questions.  We can be reached via email or through Bookings.

Further Reading:

For more information on any of the following topics, please check out our previous blog articles.

• Community of Inquiry model
• Designing a Course Through Course Mapping
• Designing S.M.A.R.T and Measurable Student Learning Outcomes
• What Students Can Derive From Purposeful and Deep Learning Discussion Boards

References:

Dabney, B. W. &E id, F. (2023). Beyond Bloom’s: Fink’s taxonomy as a catalyst for meaningful learning in nursing education. Teaching and Learning in Nursing, 000, 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.teln.2023.09.007

Fallahi, C. (2011, August 19). Using Fink’s taxonomy in course design. Association for Psychological Science. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/using-finks-taxonomy-in-course-design

Intentional College Teaching (ICT). (2023, February 5). Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning. https://intentionalcollegeteaching.org/finks-taxonomy-of-significant-learning/

Krukau, Y. (2021). A class having a recitation. [Photograph] Pexels. https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-class-having-a-recitation-8199166/

 

 

CJ Laudenbach is a student in the Mass Communications – Strategic Media Communications program at SCSU. She has past experience as a writer and editor for the University Chronicle.