Really good article on levels of learning

Learning and understanding - Gabriel Schenker's Blog -

Bloom's Taxonomy

In the 80s Benjamin Bloom published his famous Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. The taxonomy relies on the idea that not all learning objectives and outcomes have equal merit. In the absence of a classification system (a taxonomy), teachers and instructional designers may choose, for example, to emphasize memorization of facts (which makes for easier testing) rather than emphasizing other (and likely more important) learned capabilities.

Skills in the cognitive domain revolve around knowledge, comprehension, and "thinking through" a particular topic. Traditional education tends to emphasize the skills in this domain, particularly the lower-order objectives.

There are six levels in the taxonomy, moving through the lowest order processes to the highest:

1. Remember, memorize, recite
2. Understand, paraphrase
3. Apply, solve a problem
4. Analyze
5. Create, synthesize, compose
6. Evaluate, judge

Read the whole article, in fact if you take Hanselman’s advice, read it twice.