Many biology textbooks and test banks accompanying these textbooks have begun to classify multiple-choice questions (MCQs) according to Bloom’s taxonomy. Teachers, however, encounter significant difficulties in adjusting their assessment practices to the low performance of students and in helping them enhance their respective cognitive skills because the mental processes that Bloom’s categories indicate are captured from the perspective of learners’ mental behaviour or observable learning outcomes; learners are treated more as black boxes and less as input-state-output subjects, as constructivist learning theories suggest. Thus, interior mental facts and processes occurring in their minds remain unexplored. The purpose of the present paper is to open learners’ black boxes and reveal the specific mental facts and processes occurring in their cognitive structures when answering Bloom’s classified MCQs, whose subject matter content concerns biological concepts. To accomplish this purpose, we associate knowledge drawn from the philosophy of biology with the conceptual nature of Bloom’s lower-level categories such as ‘knowledge’ and ‘comprehension’. This knowledge involves types of statements and arguments that can be found in scientific language, along with different and interrelated aspects of biological concepts that learners should know if they are to understand declarative knowledge. The implications of our epistemological analysis for the nature of MCQ distractors and the notion of misconceptions will also be discussed.

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