Teachers’ Utilization of Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy in Teaching in Public Secondary Schools in Nandi County, Kenya

The academic performance of public secondary schools in comparison to private schools is a subject of great concern among stakeholders. The ideal outcome of using Bloom’s Taxonomy is to encourage performance improvement. So, the goal of the study was to ascertain how students’ academic achievement in public secondary schools in Nandi County, Kenya, was related to how teachers utilized Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy in their instruction and assessment. The objective of the study was to determine teachers’ utilization of Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy in teaching in public secondary schools. A pragmatic paradigm was used in the investigation. Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy served as the study’s foundation. With an explanatory sequential design, this study used a mixed method research methodology. The research population consisted of 2055 teachers from 137 public secondary schools. The sample size was 360 teachers from 30 county schools. 30 county schools were selected using simple random sampling, from which 12 Form 3 teachers teaching 6 selected subjects were identified. Lesson observation, questionnaires, and document analysis were used to collect data from teaching. Data was analyzed using frequencies, and means. According to the findings, 58% of the teachers utilized Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy while they were teaching. During class observation, the following percentages were used to teach using Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy: remembering 30%, understanding 29%, applying 16%, analyzing 10%, evaluating 8.0%, and creating 6.0%. The study came to the conclusion that teachers did utilize Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy in their lessons, though the percentages between the researcher’s observation and the participants’ responses varied greatly, suggesting that most teachers do not fully utilize it. This study recommended that all teachers make full utilization of Bloom’s Taxonomy in their instruction in order to encourage students’ critical thinking skills and an analytical approach to learning, which will improve their retention of the material.