OCAS Assessments adopted Bloom's Taxonomy to help students develop higher-order cognitive abilities and improve their thinking skills. Bloom's Taxonomy is a framework for categorizing levels of thinking skills, from basic recall to more complex skills, like evaluation and synthesis. It was developed by Benjamin Bloom in 1956 to classify intellectual behaviors important for learning. The taxonomy includes six cognitive levels - knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation - which represent increasing sophistication in students' skills, advancing from memory to creative abilities.

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy Page 1
The goal of OCAS Assessments is to help the students to not only understand the basic
information but also develop higher order cognitive abilities. In other words, we want to
improve the students’ ability to think and explore. To expand the cognitive skills of students,
OCAS Assessments adopted Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Bloom's taxonomy is a stairway, in which students are encouraged to achieve a higher level of
thinking, originated in an attempt to make assessments more meaningful. Bloom’s Taxonomy
articulates the learning objectives, which was developed in 1956 by education psychologist Dr.
Benjamin Bloom to categorize intellectual skills and behaviour important to learning.
Bloom identified six cognitive levels viz. knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis,
synthesis, and evaluation, with sophistication growing from basic knowledge to the highest
level, synthesis (i.e. memory skills to creative skills).
Knowledge – The student’s ability to recall and reproduce information. They can recognise and
recall relevant knowledge from long-term memory.

2. Bloom’s Taxonomy Page 2
Comprehension – The student’s ability to understand information. They can construct the
meaning from oral, written, and graphic messages through interpreting, exemplifying,
classifying, summarizing, comparing, and explaining.
Application – The student’s ability to apply information in new situations. They can use their
knowledge to new situations, to solve problems by applying rules, methods, concepts,
principles, laws, and theories.
Analysis – The student’s ability to break the information into constituent elements to infer.
They can distinguish between parts, identify and analyse patterns, organise ideas.
Evaluation – The student’s ability to make judgments about information. They can judge the
quality of something based on its adequacy, value or logic and justify their decisions.
Synthesis – The student’s ability to assemble the constituent elements of information together
for creating something new. They can use the old concepts to generate the new product or
ideas, to formulate a new classification scheme.