Taxonomy of Learning Goals from the Position of the Mental Approach
Н. И. Пак · Open Education · 2025
Purpose. Digital transformation of education determines the need to rethink the goals and meanings of the educational process and, at present, is associated with the problems of our time, the expansion of the role of artificial intelligence. The paper is devoted to the presentation of the taxonomy of educational goals from the standpoint of a mental model of thinking, which allows designing new educational results in the digital transformation of education. Methodology and methods. Unlike Bloom’s taxonomy, the main goal of modern education is the formation and development of computational thinking. The basis for constructing the taxonomy of educational goals is a mental approach, which is a set of principles and strategies for organizing the educational process aimed at forming and developing the cognitive abilities of the student. To identify the essence of computational thinking, a mental model of thinking is used, in which cognitive functions are determined by the mechanisms of perception, memorization, structuring and retrieval of information. In this model, knowledge is a structural set of mental images; mental schemes and mental models based on the first, second, and third signal systems. Results. Consideration of the mental characteristics of a modern person in a digital society, definition of the 3rd signal system in the “person + ICT + artificial intelligence” link, in which mental schemes and mental models play the main role, made it possible to formulate the stages of the educational process target settings in the form of the taxonomy of educational goals. The taxonomy of educational goals begins with the assignment of mental entropy - as a subject field of the future professional activity of a specialist, containing questions, tasks and problems. They can be formulated by traditional educational goals in the form of: know, be able to, master. The specification of these goals leads to target guidelines for the composition, volume and content of subject mental images, mental schemes and mental models. The set of mental images, schemes and models represent a knowledge block. In parallel, an ascending target block of universal cognitive operations is set, that a modern specialist must master. The pinnacle of the taxonomy is computational thinking. Based on the mental model of thinking, the essence of computational thinking is revealed and a set of universal cognitive operations is compiled. The basic composition of mental models that determine human cognitive behavior in a digital society is formed. Computational thinking is a type of thinking with the activation of conceptual-abstract and conceptual-machine superstructures of mental images, mental schemes and models in the circuit of the third signal system. Conclusion. The proposed mental taxonomy of educational goals determines the vector of the direction of digital transformation of education to achieve the main result - computational thinking. The stages of formation and the quality of computational thinking are determined by the formation of a set of universal cognitive operations, the volume and content of mental images, mental schemes and mental models of the subject area.