The research examined a school-embedded professional development initiative known as “PLC for MathemaTIC,” developed around MathemaTIC, a multilingual adaptive platform introduced in Luxembourg in 2015 as part of the national Digital Lëtzebuerg initiative. The platform provides curriculum-aligned mathematical resources, practice activities and learning games intended to support numeracy, differentiated instruction and individualized practice. Its principal aim in the professional development program was to introduce teachers to the platform, while a secondary aim was to establish collaborative teams within schools. Teachers often need sustained peer support, opportunities to experiment and guidance adapted to local classrooms, making collaboration a central part of this approach to educational technology.

The program combined online materials with face-to-face collaboration. Teachers across 19 primary schools received six structured sessions of roughly two hours each throughout the 2018–2019 school year. Videos, demonstrations, tasks and templates were hosted on Moodle, but practical work occurred within school-based groups. Each session combined a collaborative task addressing a professional learning community practice, such as reflective dialogue or shared purpose, with a pedagogical application of MathemaTIC. Groups produced shared artifacts and uploaded them for feedback from the professional development team, which they reviewed at the start of the following session. In earlier evaluations of the program, participants identified collaboration with colleagues as a particularly valuable element of the training, although the present study did not test that finding against student outcomes.

For the reported analysis, researchers focused on the fourth session’s group assignment, which asked teachers to collaboratively design a digitally enhanced mathematics lesson using either project-based learning or a flipped-classroom approach. Participants worked with the Bloom-Aligned Digital Instruction Planner, or BADIP, a tool created by the research team to connect cognitive objectives, lesson organization, digital activities, expected student products and materials. Teachers first outlined their proposed lesson ideas and then selected one or two categories from the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy for their learning objectives. The revised framework organizes cognitive processes as Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate and Create, shifting from the original taxonomy’s noun-based labels toward verbs describing what learners are expected to do.

The study included 131 primary school teachers working in 26 professional learning community groups, with group sizes ranging from two to 11 members and most containing five to eight teachers. Some groups divided into subgroups according to school cycle, producing the units counted in the analysis. Four groups did not submit the assignment, and two subgroups did not identify any Bloom’s Taxonomy categories, giving an 85% participation rate at the group level. The researchers used descriptive frequency analysis of the completed documents, treating groups and subgroups as the units of analysis. Two authors independently recorded the categories explicitly written in each BADIP form. Because the analysis counted teachers’ stated classifications rather than independently judging the quality or cognitive complexity of their lessons, it maps the designers’ stated intentions rather than proving the design quality of each activity.

“Understand” accounted for 35% of the 61 recorded category selections, making it the most common objective. “Apply” represented 28%, “Remember” 13%, “Create” 11% and “Analyze” 10%; “Evaluate” accounted for the remaining 3%. Many groups selected the adjacent pair “Understand” and “Apply.” Other combinations included Remember–Understand–Apply, Understand–Apply–Analyze and Understand–Apply–Create, although Analyze lies between Apply and Create in the revised taxonomy. Only two groups included Analyze and Evaluate together, while seven selected Create. None paired Create with Evaluate. One group was distinctive in planning across all six categories, describing a progression from foundational knowledge through critical analysis and evaluation to creative production. The researchers proposed examining that group’s approach in future case-study research rather than treating it as a proven model.

The written lesson plans show what these classifications meant in practice. One group proposed having pupils review telling time at home through MathemaTIC, present what they had learned, and then practise with worksheets while supporting one another, aligning the sequence with Remember and Understand. Another proposed watching mathematical videos at home, discussing the content at school and completing exercises with limited teacher intervention, a design classified as Understand and Apply. In a fractions example, pupils were to watch a video and recall terms such as numerator, denominator and fraction bar before exploring equivalent representations through bars and a number line and solving exercises in pairs. A final example had pupils watch a video about coordinates, discuss it, apply the content to problems and create exercises for classmates, yielding Understand, Apply and Create.

The concentration on understanding and application suggests that technology was usually being used to reinforce established forms of mathematics instruction. In these plans, digital videos supplied information, MathemaTIC exercises provided practice and feedback, and collaborative discussion or peer assistance connected those activities to classroom work. This resembles the lower levels of Puentedura’s SAMR framework, in which technology substitutes for or functionally augments traditional practice, rather than the higher levels that involve redesigning tasks or enabling activities previously impossible without digital tools. The authors offer possible explanations for the limited attention to Analyze and Evaluate: teachers may have lacked strategies or confidence for designing tasks requiring comparison, justification and critical judgment, or may have regarded digital platforms as better suited to reinforcement than argument and evaluation. These were interpretations of the frequency pattern, not mechanisms directly tested by the study.

Several limitations constrain what the results can establish. The study did not collect participating teachers’ teaching experience, prior familiarity with Bloom’s Taxonomy or technological proficiency, all of which could have influenced their category choices. BADIP requested only one or two cognitive process categories and did not explicitly address the Knowledge Dimension of the revised taxonomy. The research counted the categories teachers selected rather than conducting a detailed content analysis to determine whether their objectives and activities truly matched those categories, and the paper’s examples were selected to illustrate common combinations rather than provide a representative qualitative assessment of every lesson. The assignment also concerned planned lessons rather than their classroom implementation. Consequently, the study cannot show whether pupils engaged in higher-order thinking, whether teachers subsequently adapted the plans, or whether differences in school context or curriculum needs shaped the observed patterns.

The authors position the findings as a constructive starting point for professional development rather than evidence of teacher failure. Understanding and applying mathematical ideas are important components of primary mathematics teaching, and digital resources can extend established practices by supporting explanation, practice, consolidation and feedback. At the same time, the uneven distribution of objectives indicates where further support might be directed: helping teachers design, test and refine digitally supported activities in the Analyze, Evaluate and Create categories could broaden students’ opportunities to examine relationships, make judgments and produce original work. Future mixed-method or longitudinal research would need to follow lessons into classrooms, examine the alignment between activities and intended cognitive processes, and test whether sustained collaboration and targeted pedagogical scaffolds change teachers’ designs or pupils’ learning. The present evidence supports a narrower conclusion: in one planning exercise, most teacher groups used digital mathematics resources primarily to support understanding and application, while more ambitious cognitive demands appeared only occasionally.

Subject of Research: Descriptive study of teachers’ use of Bloom’s Taxonomy when collaboratively planning digitally enhanced primary mathematics lessons.

Article Title: How teachers use Bloom's Taxonomy in the collaborative design of digitally enhanced mathematics lessons: evidence from a PLC-based professional development program

Article References: Lomos, C., & Telli, S. (2026). How teachers use Bloom's Taxonomy in the collaborative design of digitally enhanced mathematics lessons: evidence from a PLC-based professional development program. Frontiers in Education, 11, 1764169. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1764169

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1764169

Keywords: Bloom’s Taxonomy, primary mathematics, teacher collaboration, professional learning communities, digital learning, lesson planning, MathemaTIC, cognitive objectives, Luxembourg education, professional development, teachers, Bloom's