The central theme of Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning is that learning should create a lasting impact on the lives of the learners by helping them in their personal growth.

To appreciate Fink’s Taxonomy and its six dimensions, let us begin by understanding what is meant by significant learning. According to Fink, significant learning is:

“learning that actually changes how a student lives his or her personal, social, civic, or professional life.”

The Six Dimensions of Fink’s Taxonomy

  • Foundational Knowledge
  • Application
  • Integration
  • The Human Dimension
  • Caring
  • Learning How to Learn

While the various learning domain taxonomies are hierarchical, Fink’s Taxonomy is organized as “dimensions” and not “levels.” It promotes self-directed learning and holistic growth for the learner. It doesn’t differentiate between the learning domains and is an all-encompassing framework for the overall growth and learning of a learner.

Understanding the Six Dimensions of Significant Learning

  1. Foundational Knowledge: This dimension of learning is about remembering facts and understanding concepts. In other words, laying the foundations upon which the edifice of learning shall be built. If mapped to Bloom’s Taxonomy, this would relate to levels 1 and 2.
  2. Application: This refers to the ability to do something new, such as using a skill (psychomotor), thinking creatively or critically (cognitive), or managing a project (cognitive and affective). You’d notice that in Fink’s framework, the Application dimension doesn’t differentiate between the Application and Synthesis levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. It also expands in scope to include psychomotor skills.
  3. Integration: This dimension is about the learner becoming capable of making connections between different concepts and mapping them to different experiences. This helps the learner recognize patterns and generalize and use processes across different application areas. Note that Integration maps to Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. You may have also noticed how it reflects the essentials of schema theory.
  4. Human Dimension: The human dimension of learning is how the learners connect the learning to their personal growth and self-concept, and how the content helps them lead better and more fulfilling lives.
  5. Caring: The content must help the learner grow their feelings about the subject and maybe explore new interests that are connected to their learning. I see this mapping to Krathwohl’s Taxonomy’s “valuing” level.
  6. Learning How to Learn: As the learners learn the new content, their ability to learn must improve too. Thus, they should think about how they learn and what they can/must do to learn more efficiently. This dimension lies at the intersection of cognition and feelings (one’s preference for learning methods combined with the mind’s ability to see patterns quickly.)

The first three dimensions are related mostly to the cognitive and psychomotor domain learning. The next three dimensions, however, relate more to the affective domain.

The Interconnection of Dimensions

The marvel of instructional design is felt most when we see how the principles of learning interconnect, and how an effective course/training program, automatically begins to reflect the popular theories and models.

The IDCDT-AIM Course is a case in point. This course, which I first designed in 2005, has stayed true to its philosophy all through the last two decades. It’s content however has evolved to keep pace with the changing learning scenario. You will notice that the design of the course reflects almost all the dimensions outlined in Fink’s Taxonomy. At the time, I was completely unaware of Fink’s Taxonomy (which was first introduced in 2003 and gained strong traction only in 2020). If you read what the participants feel after taking the course, you’ll notice a strong reflection of Fink’s Taxonomy in their views.

I recently did a post on Merrill’s First Principles to explain how all good courses and training programs automatically reflect all strong ID principles. As an instructional designer, we fill our quiver with the principles that we connect best with (the Caring dimension) and use them to create learning interventions that aren’t just useful, but memorable.

Lee Fink's Taxonomy of Significant Learning presents six non-hierarchical dimensions of learning

Image Credits: Google Gemini