Bloom’s Taxonomy and Legal Information Tiers
Not all legal information requires the same kind of thinking, but we often present it as if it does.
In education, there is a well-established framework called Bloom’s Taxonomy. It is often represented as a pyramid, with the simplest cognitive tasks at the bottom and the more complicated tasks at the top. Teachers use Bloom’s Taxonomy to scaffold their lessons – that means starting with simpler ideas that gradually build their way up to more complicated concepts over time.
In the access-to-justice context, we aren’t building long-term lesson plans that roll out over weeks and months, but understanding the difficulty level of the legal information we are working with helps us choose more effective strategies when working with self-represented people.
The complete Bloom’s Taxonomy has six different levels with dozens of cognitive tasks, but for our purposes, we can adapt it by breaking legal information into three Legal Information Tiers:
Specific Information
Informed Application
Generalizable Knowledge
Specific Information
Specific Information refers to concrete details that a self-represented person must know or use to complete a legal task, but do not require analysis or critical thinking. Specific Information includes addresses or filing fees, rules for calculating dates or support payments, or processes to follow to serve another party.
Specific Information is often important information. After all, deadlines and addresses matter, especially if you have a hearing coming up. However, memorizing this information usually provides little or no benefit to a person as long as they can refer back to it later. A response deadline can be calculated and recorded. A legal process can be broken into steps and followed later. Identifying Specific Information and placing it into an easy reference format means that users do not have to expend effort memorizing it for later use.
Informed Application
Next, a self-represented person uses Informed Application when they apply legal information to their own facts and circumstances. This often involves answering questions on a court form, but it also happens when people have to choose whether or not to engage in a legal process in the first place.
There are two parts to Informed Application: First, we have to effectively express legal information accurately and in a way that a self-represented person can understand. Second, we have to prompt that person to make a statement or act while using their own judgment and analysis. Ideally, we should try to express legal information at the exact point where the user needs to act. That way, they do not have to memorize the legal information, but they can still proceed while understanding their decision.
Generalizable Knowledge
Where Informed Application helps a person make a decision at a specific point in time, Generalizable Knowledge addresses broader concepts that can serve a self-represented person throughout the life of their case. For example, consider the following principle:
Courts want to be fair, and fairness means everyone gets a chance to be heard.
This is an idea that most of us can relate to. If someone told a parent, teacher or boss that we did something wrong, most of us would want a chance to tell our side of the story.
A person might encounter this principle when they begin a divorce process, only to learn they must formally serve the other party to let them know about the case. If that same person later files a motion, they might wonder whether they have to mail a copy of their motion to the other party. Unless there is an emergency of some sort, the other party should get a chance to be heard. The principle suggests the answer is yes.
All Tiers Have their Place
Specific Information, Informed Application and Generalizable Knowledge all have their place when designing content for self-represented people. It is our responsibility to recognize which Legal Information Tier we are working with, and to design accordingly.
