1.4 Cognitive Skills Across the Curriculum (Bloom's Six Processes)

1.4 Cognitive Skills Across the Curriculum (Bloom's Six Processes)

Cognition as a Core C

Cognition is one of the 4 Cs introduced in section 1.1: a CLIL lesson must develop learners' thinking skills, not only their subject knowledge and language. The Cambridge TKT: CLIL syllabus adapts a widely used framework — from Coyle, Hood and Marsh (2010), itself adapted from Bloom's taxonomy — that organises thinking skills into six main cognitive processes. Each process has its own set of typical verbs and example classroom activities that develop it.

The Six Cognitive Processes

This table is the single highest-yield content in the whole content area — Cambridge frequently asks candidates to match a classroom activity or verb to the correct cognitive process, so knowing the six labels alone is not enough; you need to be able to place unfamiliar verbs and activities into the right category by their meaning.

Worked Example: A Science Lesson on the Water Cycle

Imagine a CLIL science lesson on the water cycle, taught in English to a class whose first language is not English. A well-planned lesson takes learners through all six cognitive processes:

• Remembering: Learners label a diagram of the water cycle with the terms "evaporation," "condensation," "precipitation," and "collection," and recite the stages in order.
• Understanding: Learners explain in their own words why clouds form, classify different types of precipitation (rain, snow, sleet), and sequence a set of jumbled diagram cards into the correct order.
• Applying: Learners carry out a simple evaporation experiment, calculate how much water evaporates from an open dish over a day, and present their results to another group.
• Analysing: Learners examine two locations with very different rainfall and give reasons for the difference, or show the difference between evaporation and boiling.
• Evaluating: Learners assess a classmate's diagram of the water cycle for accuracy and recommend one improvement, or give an opinion on which stage of the cycle matters most for agriculture.
• Creating: Learners design a poster or short animation that explains the water cycle to younger pupils, or invent a simple demonstration model using classroom materials.

Worked Example: A Geography Lesson on Rivers

The same structure applies to a geography lesson on river landforms. Learners might first identify and name landforms on a map (Remembering), describe how a meander forms (Understanding), experiment with a stream table to model erosion (Applying), deduce why erosion is faster on the outside of a bend (Analysing), judge which of two flood-management proposals is more effective (Evaluating), and finally design their own flood-defence plan for a fictional town (Creating).

Why the Progression Matters

Bloom's six processes are conventionally presented from the least cognitively demanding (Remembering) to the most demanding (Creating), and CLIL lesson planning typically moves learners through this progression within a single lesson or across a short sequence of lessons: starting with recall and understanding tasks that build the vocabulary and basic facts learners need, and only then moving to applying, analysing, evaluating, and creating tasks that require learners to use that content and language more independently. This progression also matches the CLIL principle from section 1.1 of providing cognitively challenging material from the beginning while scaffolding learners toward it: Remembering and Understanding activities are often where the heaviest language scaffolding (vocabulary lists, sentence frames, labelled diagrams) is provided, freeing learners to focus on the thinking demands of the later, higher-order tasks. Higher-order processes such as Evaluating and Creating typically demand more complex, decontextualised language — the CALP described in section 1.1 — because justifying a judgement or designing something original requires learners to produce extended, reasoned language rather than single-word recall answers.

A Common Exam Trap

A frequent test item gives an activity verb — e.g. "sequence," "deduce," or "rate" — without naming the process, and asks candidates to identify which of the six cognitive processes it belongs to. Because several verbs sound similar (e.g. "compare" under Understanding versus "examine" under Analysing, or "consider" under Evaluating versus "classify" under Understanding), the safest preparation is to learn the table by category meaning rather than by memorising an alphabetical list: Remembering means simple recall of facts already given; Understanding means making sense of and reorganising information; Applying means using a method or procedure in a new situation; Analysing means breaking something down and reasoning about its parts; Evaluating means making a judgement against criteria; and Creating means producing something original.