ASSESSMENT TOOLS BASED ON BLOOM’S TAXONOMY OF EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES

Fair and useful assessment of student abilities is often a difficult task. Ideally, evaluation instruments should assess how well the student has understood material directly presented (knowledge and comprehension), how well the student can apply this information to a new problem (application), how well a student can distinguish and relate the component parts of a topic or argument (analysis) and how well a student can extend his/her learning to new areas (synthesis and design). These four skills represent different, progressive, levels of understanding, that fall along an abridged hierarchy as that outlined in Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. This paper describes a method of designing in-class exams and take-home projects for a freshman computer science course. Here, the design of the test questions and project requirements makes explicit use of this abridged version of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. The in-class tests described in this work evaluate the depth of a student’s understanding by incorporating a planned variety of questions, ranging from those easily answered by a student who has understood basic lectures and reading to problems requiring novel application of basic tools. Based on the degree of difficulty of the questions answered, students are graded according to a deterministic criterion (as opposed to, e.g., scaling based on class averages). The take-home projects also employ a deterministic criterion that indicates precisely what is expected of the student for each of three performance levels: passing (C), good (B) and excellent (A). An important feature of this design is that the instructions for the lower level work are more detailed and require less student innovation, whereas the instructions for A level projects offer less direction.