Synthesis in Bloom*
At least forty years ago, I began to reflect on the synthesizing of ideas and concepts. I was impelled by a number of factors: the kinds of books and monographs that I liked to study—often broad historical treatises; the efforts involved in preparing two textbooks; introspection about the operations of my own mind; and testimony from experts, like Nobel laureate Murray Gell Mann, who underscored the importance of human synthesizing capacities. In 2005, I featured the “synthesizing mind” as one of five “Minds of the Future”—and then, when choosing a self-referential title for my own memoir, I hit upon a phrase “A Synthesizing Mind.” And now there are numerous blogs in this series.
Throughout that period, there was an idea lurking in the back of my mind which failed to make it into my active thinking. Here’s the background.
At least since the middle of the 19th century, the study of the mind (Psychology), and how to educate it (Pedagogy), has been a focus of education in Europe. At the time, as part of their training, young American scholars routinely went to institutions in Germany, France, and Britain, and learned about these topics and approaches. And when they brought these concerns back home, they inevitably gave them a “pragmatic” American focus and twist.
In the middle of the 20th century, The University of Chicago was one of the leading universities in the country. Its faculty and senior administration had a special interest in the processes of education—from early childhood through to doctoral studies. Reflecting the aforementioned American slant, leaders in education occupied themselves with creating conceptual frameworks. They pondered the principal educational goals; how do we achieve these goals; how do we measure our success in doing so. According to historians of education, the leading figures in the psychology of learning would include Lee Cronbach (then at Illinois), Henry Dyer (Educational Testing Service), and Nate Gage (Illinois). Perhaps pre-eminent among the leading figures were Ralph Tyler, at the University of Chicago, and his star pupil Benjamin Bloom.
Nearly all scholars in all disciplines are soon forgotten—and that is inevitable and perhaps just as well. More likely to be remembered in psychology are those who invented a device (The Skinner box); a purported law (Yerkes-Dodson law of arousal), or a mode of treatment (Kleinian analysis). Worthy of inclusion in this cohort was Benjamin Bloom who—in the middle 1950s—introduced a Taxonomy of Educational Objectives…six of them in number.
When I began to study education, I encountered Bloom’s name. We were both interested in the nature of talent; we both came from northeastern Pennsylvania; and we were both bookish Jewish boys, whose parents had escaped “just in time” from Europe. I was also aware that he had created an ordered ‘taxonomy of educational objectives’—and if pressed, I could probably have rattled them off (in order, Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation). I should have known—though I did not—that by the end of Bloom’s career, the list had been changed (Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create). Synthesis had been unceremoniously dropped.
But my assignment here is not intellectual history—it’s understanding what synthesis is, how to evaluate it, how to nurture it. And there, Ben Bloom (as he was called) and his colleagues were on to something. As they conceived it, synthesis was the fifth of six deliberately ordered cognitive capacities. The act of synthesizing entails putting together items or elements into a structure that was not clear before—one that clear entails more than its sheer raw materials. And in so doing, it provides evidence of creativity—ending up with something more than the materials with which one began (Bloom, 1956, p 162).
In studying any capacity, it’s useful to have an example of that capacity at its highest level. Bloom comes through here. He mentions the formulation of the periodic table in chemistry; and the development of taxonomies for classifying plants and animals according to their basic properties. And in so doing, he clearly acknowledges the accompanying roles of creativity and evaluation.
However, the lofty niche occupied by the capacity to synthesize immediately pointed out problems when it came to how best to assess that capacity in an individual:
1. Latitude—the person has a lot of flexibility in what he/she selects, focuses on, proceeds to do
2. Agency— the requirements can and perhaps should come from the learner (rather than the assessor)
3. Time—Synthesis can (and perhaps should) take a considerable time—most any student of synthesis should bear in mind Charles Darwin, who worked for close to thirty years on his synthesis of the evidence for the theory of evolution!
4. Administration—One must take into account the conditions under which relevant items are presented, by whom, with which parameters
5. Sampling—One must determine the possible items from which to select a problem, and whether these items provide a representative test of synthesizing capacity
6. Evaluation—On most short-answer items, the correct answer is (or should be) unambiguous. Not so, for more complex and more creative exercises—there can (and perhaps should be) quite different criteria, which might (and perhaps should) lead to different ‘grades’. Indeed, knowing in which way to evaluate a work, the parameters of depth, breadth, originality—these all matter.
To the extent that a synthesizing response is genuinely original, one can anticipate that evaluators may well disagree on the quality of that synthesis—and yet, it’s hardly practical to provide many evaluations for a particular learner or a particular item.
Or, as Bloom put it: One must determine the ‘fit’ between the original problem or project that is posed to the learner, and the response that the learner provides…whether quickly or over a period of time.
My conclusion: Bloom did a proper job of defining and introducing the concept of synthesizing. He also did an excellent job of delineating the various pitfalls in proceeding from ‘description’ to the ‘creation of test items’ to the ‘evaluation of student performance.’
And perhaps, in laying out the problems, we receive a possible explanation of why ‘synthesizing’ was eventually dropped from the list of educational objectives—though its replacement by ‘creating’ seems to me simply to have kicked the proverbial testing objectives down the road.
In earlier writings (Gardner 2006, 2020), I have offered an explanation of why ‘psychology has dropped the ball’ on synthesis. Briefly, our prototypical examples of deft synthesizing cannot be adequately simulated in the psychological laboratory or the testing room in minutes, or even in an hour. And so, or at least so far, we do not have good methods of studying synthesis—and, hence, also lack effective methods for training and evaluating synthesis. At least, we cannot do so to the satisfaction of current standards of psychology research, testing, publication.
But once we take a broader swathe, that problem proves much less severe. For example, students have been writing book reports and term papers (and even theses) for many decades. Certainly, there are ways to aid these students’ efforts at synthesis. A similar argument can be put forth in laboratory sciences or in computing—consider for example the educational efforts of Nobel laureate, Carl Wieman (2017). Strengthening our synthesizing muscles should be relatively easy to do. And we have plenty of experience in evaluating student writings or performances on lab exercises.
A bigger task: To identify individuals who have synthesizing potential or talents—and this means coming up with authentic ways to evaluate this potential; to determine how best to nurture those talents; and to help promising synthesizers to navigate the current occupational and research landscape, where the rewards seem to go to those who can go deeper (the vertical aspect of T), rather than broader (the horizontal aspects of T).
*This is a wordplay on the title of a popular song, “Love in Bloom.”
References
Bloom, B. S., Krathwohl, D. R., & Masia, B. B. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives. David McKay Company.
Gardner, H. (2006). Five minds for the future. Harvard Business School Press.
Gardner, H. (2020). A synthesizing mind: a memoir from the creator of multiple intelligences theory. The MIT Press.
Wieman, C. E. (2017). Improving how universities teach science: lessons from the Science Education Initiative.
Harvard University Press.