IMPROVING ASSESSMENT STRATEGY: APPLICATION OF BLOOM’S TAXONOMY IN EXAMINATION SETTING
Are we teaching what we think we are teaching?’ and ‘Are students learning what we think they are learning?”
In order to improve the quality of teaching, it is widely believed that one must be able to set
good/proper questions. To do that, there should be a relationship between a course’s learning outcomes and the cognitive level of the examination questions.
To undertake this task, a taxonomy is needed to evaluate the learning outcomes and the examination questions. Several could have been selected, however Bloom’s is chosen because it is: i) widely recognizable and familiar to many academics, ii) generic and applicable across a wide range of subjects, iii) easy to apply to a range of question types owing to its simple structure.
Bloom's taxonomy is a classification system of educational objective s based on the level of students’ achievement and mastery of the subject content. It contains six levels, with the principle that competence at a higher level implies a reasonable degree of competence than at the lower levels. For a balance examination question/paper all these levels must be tested.
An explanation along with question verb examples that represent intellectual activity of the six levels, are:
- Knowledge/Remembering; Questions on the knowledge level require the students to remember facts
they have already learned and recall these as they have been learned. Question verbs: Define, list,
state, identify, label, arrange, name, order, etc.
2. Comprehension/Understanding; Students must be able to rephrase information using their own
statements and translate knowledge into new context and interpret graphs, tables, charts , etc.
Question verbs: Explain, Discuss, predict, interpret, infer, report, summarize, convert, classify, give an
example of x, etc.
3. Application/Applying; Students are required to identify the relevant information and rules to arrive at
a solution and solve problems using known algorithms. Question verbs: How could x be used to y? How
would you show, make use of, modify, suggest, solve, demonstrate, apply x to conditions y, etc.
4. Analysis/Analying: The analysis level requires that students separate an idea into its parts or elements and demonstrate an understanding of the relationship of the parts to the whole. Question verbs:
Differentiate, compare/contrast, distinguish x from y, how does x affect or relate to y?, etc.
5. Evaluation. Questions at this level require students to make judgements about the value or merits of
an idea, purpose, solution to a problem, procedure, method or product. This level requires students to
use the other five levels of the taxonomy to varying degrees. Question verbs: Justify, evaluate, judge x
according to given criteria, which option would be better/preferable to party y?, argue, assess,
critique, defend, evaluate, judge, etc.
6. Synthesis/Creating is the ultimate aim of students’ learning journey. At this final level of Bloom’s taxonomy, students demonstrate what they have learnt by creating something new, either tangible or conceptual. This level permits students to devise ways to design experiments and test hypotheses. Students may be required to write a paper and a report in which ideas are synthesised or problems are solved. This might include, for example, writing a report, creating a computer program, or revising a process to improve its results. Question verbs: compose, construct, create, devise, generate, organize, plan, design, formulate, develop, etc.
From Bloom’s Taxonomy, successive levels can be paired to form three groups (lower, intermediate and
higher), with qualitatively different assessment standards expected between them.
Reference:
- Jones, K.O., Harland, J., Reid, J.M. and Bartlett, R., 2009, October. Relationship between examination questions and Bloom's taxonomy. In 2009 39th IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
2. Boon, K. M., & Lim, L. T. (2014). An examination question paper preparation system with content -style separation and bloom’s taxonomy categorisation. In The Third International Conference on E-Learning and E-Technologies in Education
(ICEEE2014) (pp. 39-47).
