Teaching for transfer, or teaching for meaning, involves enabling students not only to remember and understand but also to use knowledge in increasingly more complex ways (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). A taxonomy can help you bring to mind the wide range of important learning targets and thinking skills you want students to attain. For any content domain, you typically want students to know some facts and concepts and also to be able to think and reason with these facts and concepts in some way. Each time students solve new problems or do original thinking with their knowledge, they are transferring and transforming what they learned, and their understanding grows.

Bloom's is probably the most commonly used taxonomy in the United States, but there are other taxonomies, too. They are all useful for categorizing learning objectives and assessments according to level of complexity: from recall through near transfer (applying ideas in a manner similar to how they were taught) and through far transfer (using ideas in farther-ranging and more complex contexts than originally taught). Your instruction and assessment should match your intended learning target in both content (what the student learns) and cognitive complexity (what the student is able to do with the learning).

What Are Cognitive Taxonomies?