The Dimensional Thinker: From Building a Constructivist Edge to Finding Bloom on Mars

Pofessor William C. Bruce sometimes thinks of THE DIMENSIONAL THINKER as the fertility of Extra Virgin Bloom's taxonomy: how not to define knowledge just by memory, but by comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Professor Bruce makes a point about taxonomy by drawing on facts about the olive tree. Early olive tree classification presented one of the first ways our ancestors improved olive oil. What may seem at odds with categorization is Auguste Rodin, his sculpture, The Thinker. Rodin never named The Thinker. Rodin’s Thinker represents all mankind. Mars represents the Rosetta Stone of goals. Blooms taxonomy is the Rosetta Stone for categorization of educational objectives. To Professor Bruce, the question of how humans reached Mars looms as incredibly poignant. Explorers of Mars had to own a bank of creative processes. Did those creative processes exploit different cognitive domains? Gene sequencing made taxonomy a hot scientific field. Professor Bruce believes that categorizing educational objectives is important enough to try to change the way we think about instructive taxonomy. This book is based on the principle that the mind’s resourcefulness develops better complex thinking processes when presented with complex thinking objectives. Professor Bruce brings life to Bloom’s taxonomy through instruction, categorization exercises with feedback, glossaries, and summative assessments. Professor Bruce crafts the variations on the different thinking level themes, called dimensions, and how they network. Whether inspired by the potential of Mars exploration, or merely as a human survival affirmation, the text emphasizes how to use the categorization of educational objectives to build thinking skills that go beyond memory level to evaluation.