Information Synthesis

This brings us to the second aspect of learning—and arguably the most complex. Though many of us can learn to absorb information better by simply opening our eyes and paying attention, this next step may prove to be more of a challenge to optimize.

So far, we’ve spent some time discussing learning in the abstract, or memory in the simple sense of recalling random strings of information. Of course, the real world is far more complicated than this, and beyond grade school there isn’t too much of a need to learn “parrot fashion” or memorize data like a machine.

“Learning” is in fact a broad, very sophisticated set of functions, and the ability to synthesize the information coming in is perhaps the most important. You could be perfectly adept at absorbing and remembering information, but what good is it if the information is unclear, irrelevant, or just plain wrong? How do you use that information to actually improve your life? That’s a question that cannot be answered with information that has only been absorbed in a shallow way.

In a very real sense, learning is about comprehension. It’s about chewing on information and seeing it from all angles. It goes deeper than the symbols meant to portray certain ideas, processes, or connections. Our learning will always be far richer—and more robust—if we can truly grasp it intellectually, process it, interpret it, and in general interact with it actively rather than merely take it in uncritically. So much of learning actually takes place during the synthesis process—even as you read this, your brain is working hard to convert these ideas into meaning, into pictures in the mind, into abstract concepts that you have an emotional reaction to.

Synthesis of information entails asking questions, trying to understand what we know, what we don’t know, and how to bridge the gaps. It takes context into account, it’s adaptive and responsive, and it’s curious about its own learning process—i.e., metacognition. This part of the learning process is all about playing with information and seeing it from different angles.

Bloom On

created by Benjamin Bloom in: 1956

It essentially states that for the highest level of subject understanding, there are six sequential levels we must be able to complete. Most people will never make it through all the levels in the taxonomy, so don’t let yourself fall victim to that fate. The current taxonomy’s levels are, from lowest level to highest level of understanding, as follows:

• Remember. Retrieving, recognizing, and recalling relevant knowledge from long‐term memory.

• Understand. Constructing meaning from oral, written, and graphic messages through interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing, and explaining.

• Apply. Carrying out or using a procedure for executing or implementing.

• Analyze. Breaking material into constituent parts and determining how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose through differentiating, organizing, and attributing.

• Evaluate. Making judgments based on criteria and standards through checking and critiquing.

• Create. Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure through generating, planning, or producing.

Once you hit the top level of “create,” then you can be considered to have a deep grasp on a subject. Without advancing through each level of the taxonomy, you can’t adequately perform the next levels. We see this illustrated in our lives every day whenever someone who doesn’t have an adequate understanding of a topic seeks to evaluate it and make a judgment upon it. That’s because of a failure to follow the taxonomy!

Bloom’s taxonomy is a particularly useful tool to help guide and shape your learning process. Basically, the taxonomy is a list of how to actively interact with new information. It focuses on the mental processes that allow you to frame information and analyze it, each verb a kind of mental tool to grasp and manipulate new incoming data. Bloom’s framework is great because it’s so versatile and can be used literally anywhere. In the classroom, at work, or in designing your own systems for achieving your personal goals, this taxonomy gives you a shorthand to work with.

The entire taxonomy is predicated on the mental process of learning, which can actually be summed up quite nicely. Before you can understand a concept, you must remember it. To apply a concept, you must first understand it. In order to evaluate a process, you must have analyzed it. To create an accurate conclusion, you must have completed a thorough evaluation. The challenge is introspection and understanding where you currently fall on the taxonomy, because only then can you understand what is required for you to move forward in your mastery.

Let’s dive into each element more deeply.

First, remembering contains elements like listening, finding information (using tools like Googling, perhaps) actively memorizing data, bookmarking important information to return to later, highlighting key points to synthesize later, and repeating information again and again to drill it.

This aspect is all about taking information and fixing it somehow so that you can store it and retrieve it later. If you’re the kind of person who likes to make extensive bookmarks and notes about things you want to read or watch later, then you are actively remembering. You are also helping your long-term memory put down information whenever you tabulate or put information in easy-to-remember bullet points. Remembering also entails outlining key features or quotes or defining the main ideas so that you can recall the summary later on. Whenever you revise for an exam, you’re using these skills.

Understanding happens whenever we engage with information more actively. Whereas remembering is about concretizing and storing information, understanding is about picking it all apart to better see how it works, like some people do to household appliances! Categorizing data (like we’re doing here), grouping information into chunks, inferring from the data you have and predicting future events based on it, summarizing, and paraphrasing in different words are all cognitive operations intended to get to the deeper meaning of a set of symbols or patterns.

Teachers who ask their students to write things “in their own words” are doing so because they don’t want to test for memorization; they want to test for understanding. If you comprehend a thing deeply, you are able to manipulate it, no matter how its components are rearranged or what symbols are used to express it. If you’ve ever tried to explain something complicated to someone who’s not familiar with the concept, you may have found it helpful to give them a related example. You could outline a metaphor from a concept that they’d understand more easily and show how the ideas relate to one another. This relating, and associating, is key to developing deep understanding of a topic.

Applying is the third category. This is, broadly, where information is brought into the “real world” and made manifest, whether that’s by executing, sketching, acting out, or articulating. As you’re probably noticing, many of these terms have significant overlap with other verbs in other categories—and this should obviously be the case, when you consider that the brain isn’t ever really performing discrete activities, but rather flowing in one continuous action that, for our purposes, we’re trying to understand using different models.

In fact, Bloom’s verb taxonomy is itself a form of “applying”—it’s charting or presenting information in a concrete way—i.e., applying the abstract concepts to make manifest a model, idea, or concept. Painting, preparing, displaying, reenacting, and even playing are all verbs associated with this category of the taxonomy. Every time you make a pie chart to illustrate data, turn a plan into reality, or design an experiment that actually gets carried out, you’re “applying.”

The fourth category is analyzing, which is pretty self-explanatory. Verbs in this category include questioning, explaining, organizing, deconstructing, correlating, and calculating. This includes all those verbs that show us actively operating on and manipulating information that comes in, not just to pass it from one form to another, but to look really closely at its constituents, trying to understand them. Bloom’s theory itself is an example of appraising and categorizing. You’re participating in these functions when you draw a mind map, integrate one set of ideas with another set, break down a machine into its components, or ask, “Why is this happening?”

The fifth element is evaluating, and it includes any verbs that show that we’re applying some value judgments to the material in front of us. In the previous category, analysis is value-neutral and merely about understanding. This category, however, concerns things like criticizing, rating, reflecting, reviewing, assessing, and validating. This is where our brains practice discernment—and the weighing up of the information against stated aims and goals. How useful are the results of your experiment? What is the quality and veracity of the claims you’re appraising? How well did you perform? How can you editorialize or else compile all this information into a whole that actually says something?

The final verb group is creating. Here, our relationship to information is quite fundamental: we make it! Composing music, mixing known things to create something new, filming a movie, writing the script, and role-playing the characters are all creative ways to engage with information and build something novel. Other creative endeavors you might not have thought of include programming, designing systems, adapting material from one form into another, or even things like podcasting or blogging. Curiously, Bloom even considered leading to be creative, since leadership often involves guiding people toward an entirely new and self-made vision.

Again, these verbs and categories will always overlap—the point is not to identify discrete categories. Rather, this model is a tool to help you play with information and see it from many different angles, in the same way as a toolbox of differently colored glasses could be worn to look at the same information in different lights. When you’re trying to learn and memorize, it makes a huge difference to engage actively and deliberately with information—not just in one or two ways, but in as many as possible. This way, data comes alive, becoming three-dimensional and allowing you a depth of understanding that will last longer than more shallow impressions.