Applying Critical Thinking Skills to Improve Students’ Essay Writing Skills

In 1950s, Bloom created a taxonomy in order to promote higher forms of thinking in education, referring to three main domains of learning: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. Of the three domains, the cognitive domain involves knowledge and the development of intellectual skills (Bloom, 1956, in Anderson &Krathworhl, 2001). This domain includes the recall or recognition of specific facts, procedural patterns, and concepts that serve in the development of intellectual abilities and skills with six major categories of – from the simplest to most complex ones – knowledge (recalling the information), comprehension or understanding, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Among these six stages, the two first stages can be seen as the descriptive thinking, and the remaining stages are the critical thinking. According to Krathwohl, Bloom and Masia (1973), the affective domain in learning skills includes the manner in which students deal with things emotionally, such as feelings, values, appreciation, enthusiasms, motivations, and attitudes. The third domain in Bloom’s taxonomy mentions to psychomotor learning, which relates to learners’ manual or physical skills. However, while the cognitive and affective domains are intensively produced as an elaborate compilation in education environments, the psychomotor domain is usually ignored (Wilson, 2018).