The Revised Bloom's Taxonomy: implications for educating nurses

One of the essential goals for continuing education in nursing is to enhance nurses' ability to improve patient care outcomes. Toward this goal, learners need to transfer learned knowledge to actual practice. Achieving effective transfer requires knowledge of thinking paradigms in relation to specific subject content. Educators can facilitate knowledge transfer by developing instructional designs that incorporate subject content and cognitive processes related to the use of the subject content. However, it is difficult to develop such instructional designs. The Revised Bloom's Taxonomy provides a framework for meeting this educational need. In this article, the authors establish the relevance of the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy to continuing education and describe how to use the taxonomy to plan an educational session with an emphasis on promoting knowledge transfer.