Michele Galla, Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis

Imagine an intelligence defined by paradox: unable to recall the basic facts about Shakespeare's life, but brilliantly capable of instantly composing a flawless Shakespearean sonnet about a ham sandwich in perfect iambic pentameter. Researchers discovered similarly surprising results from generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in educational contexts. GenAI systems exhibit a seemingly paradoxical inversion of Bloom's Taxonomy: they often excel at the taxonomy’s higher-order creation, evaluation, and analysis skills, while frequently failing Bloom’s lower-order abilities to recall well-known facts or apply simple concepts. The Bloom’s Inversion is more than a technical oddity; it challenges decades of pedagogical thinking built on the sequential climb up Bloom's hierarchy. If our most advanced learning tools don't follow this order, what does that mean for teaching and learning, particularly for nurturing human creativity?

• Galla, Michele, Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, "Generative AI Turns Bloom’s Taxonomy Upside-Down: Implications for Creativity and Learning,” in Oxford Handbook of Human Creativity x Generative AI in Education, edited by Ronald A. Beghetto, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025.

• Full text of preprint here:

  

  Generative AI and Creativity