Bloom vs Common Core

I would guess that every teacher has heard about Bloom's Taxonomy at some point in the career training.  The infamous pyramid displaying how students progress from lower to higher order thinking is a faculty room staple.  If you are not familiar with Bloom's Taxonomy, check out the image below. 

 

Benjamin Bloom split learning into three domains: cognitive, affective, and psycho motor.  The cognitive realm investigates the intellectual side of students.  Bloom categories students into six levels of cognitive learning, as seen above.  Students progress from knowledge, the rote memory of facts, to evaluation, where they can dissect and value information and transfer it to other parts of their life.   

I wonder what Benjamin Bloom would say about the Common Core... 

If you check out the Common Core State Standards, specifically in Science Literacy, you will find a list of standards.  Phrases such as, "determine the meaning", "analyze the structure" and "compare and contrast" are spread throughout the standards.  I believe that Bloom would categorize these Common Core learning tasks as falling into either the application or analysis level of cognitive thinking.  That being said, I did not find any standards that required students to work at the synthesis or evaluation level of cognitive thinking.  While Common Core definitely tasks students with doing more than rote recalling of facts, they are lacking in the intense tasks that will require students to activate prior knowledge and create new information of meaning. 

I worry that although the standards are asking students to work at a moderate to high level thinking, teachers may not be aware of what level of cognitive ability they are assessing.  Too often recalling information is thought to be synonymous with understanding and opportunities to create higher order thinkers are lost.