Chronic Diseases Essay

Bloom's Taxonomy Education Nursing Education

Bloom's Taxonomy of learning and its use in nursing education:

Chronic diseases

Bloom's taxonomy of learning suggests that there are different levels of mastery when a student first confronts a topic. There are also three domains of learning: cognitive, which pertains to mental skills of the acquisition of knowledge; affective, which relates to emotional growth; and the psychomotor domain which pertains to physical skills (Clark, 2015, "Original cognitive"). This taxonomy is not only applicable to students learning in the classroom but also to patients. Nurses can act as teachers, particularly for patients and their families managing chronic disease who must assume many of the healthcare-related tasks performed by nurses in hospital settings.

On a cognitive level, according to Bloom, on the level from simplest to most complex there are the following levels of learning, as located on a hierarchy. The first, knowledge, refers to conveying factual knowledge to the individual: such as the fact he or she is diabetic, has heart disease, or the mechanics of the illness. The nurse must have basic knowledge about the illness which she then transmits to the patient. However, this is only a first step. There must also be comprehension. Can the patient restate what the illness in layperson's terms, in a manner that is meaningful and understandable to him or her?

Once comprehension has taken place, then application, or applying this understanding to making meaningful changes (such as dietary modifications and adhering to a medical regime of drugs and other therapies) is possible. The nurse must know how to apply her information to the patient's condition and the patient must do so as well. The next level (which not all patients may attain) is analysis: does the nurse and the patient know why this occurred? For example, a patient with diabetes might say, "I gained weight after I graduated from college, took my first job, stopped playing my college sport, and my bad dietary habits and my family history of diabetes caught up with me." The nurse must likewise identify triggers of the illness to apply them to a treatment plan that minimizes the future risks to the patient posed by the progression of the illness.

On the level of synthesis, on an independent level the patient can take the new information given by the nurse about the illness and use it to create new knowledge, such as the idea that lifestyle changes may be important to adopt before trying more intensive measure like drugs. Nurses can learn from their patients, synthesizing information from previous experience to make the information useful beyond a purely anecdotal level. The highest level is evaluation, or reflecting in an accurate fashion on the degree to which the…