Instructional Design - The Taxonomy Table

Models -- Course Development

Taxonomies and Assessing Student Learning

Student Learning in Higher Education

By  Brown, Bull, & Pendlebury, 1997

Taxonomies of learning provide broad classifications, sometimes hierarchies, of skills or capabilities which are useful for matching assessment tasks against what one wants to learn in a module or program. The most common taxonomy was developed by Bloom (1965).  It provides a quick check of  cognitive skills might be demanded by an assessment task.

Beneath every taxonomy lurks an epistemology and not every one will find the taxonomies are suitable for their courses.   However, a classification of the kinds of skills and capabilities that one wants students to develop is a necessary step in developing an effective assessment system.  Even so, taxonomies provide only a framework, they do not provide fine detail of content.  In deed, if they did, they would clog the decision-making and design process.  Just as skills may be expressed at different levels, so too outcomes may be expressed at the level of class, a module, a year or a degree program or a college.  There is unlikely to be one-to-one correspondence between outcomes at various levels.  Nonetheless one should be able to see how the assessment and outcomes of various levels are linked together.  Of these the most important are the links between the assessment, the outcomes of the module and the module program. (pages 37-38)

How to Write Objectives

Adapted from A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Lorin W. Andersin, David R. Krathwohl; et al. 2001 Addison Wesley Longman.

To dispell the confusion between the means and ends of instruction, contemplate these definitions:

Ends

 

Objectives describe intended

results, outcomes, and changes.

 

Means

 

Instructional activities, such as

reading a textbook, listening to

lectures, conducting surveys, and

observing field work, are means

by which objectives are achieved.

For an objective or outcome to be measurable, learning a fact, concept, or procedure is implied.

In addition, invoking a change central to a students' beliefs moves the learning to the highest level: meta-cognitive knowledge.

Examples taken from OSU Extended Campus distance courses are attached to each category in the Cognitive Process Dimension and the Knowledge Dimension in the taxonomy table below.

Bloom's Taxonomy

	The Cognitive Process Dimension
The Knowledge Dimension	Remember	Understand	Apply	Analyze	Evaluate	Create
Factual Knowledge	List	Summarize	Classify	Order	Rank	Combine
Conceptual Knowledge	Describe	Interpret	Experiment	Explain	Assess	Plan
Procedural Knowledge	Tabulate	Predict	Calculate	Differentiate	Conclude	Compose
Meta- Cognitive Knowledge	Appropriate Use	Execute	Construct	Achieve	Action	Actualize

Taxonomy Table Examples 

Developing Objectives and Relating them to Assessment

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Reliability, Validity, and Examining

In Student Learning in Higher Education

By Brown, Bull, & Pendlebury, 1997

In the following, Brown, Bull, & Pendlebury, (1997) examine the nature of reliability and validity and their implications for assessing student learning.  They focus upon the underlying concepts since it is the concepts that are crucial to a fair and effective assessment system.

The standard approaches to reliability and validity are derived from psychometrics, a subject which partially concerned with the development of personality and intelligence tests.  The psychometric approach is based on upon the notion of an ideal which can be achieved if only one can reduce the errors.  In practice there is such a range of values involved at the higher levels of knowledge and understanding that it would be dangerous to assume that there is only one ideal.  Despite this reservation, discussions of reliability and validity do help to clarify the purpose of assessment and one's assessment procedures.

However, assessment in education requires slightly different approach from psychometrics.  Knowledge and understanding are significant features of assessment in education.  The specific content of assignments and examinations and their purposes differ from the content and purposes of psychological tests.  Consequently, non-statistical approaches such as the use of judgment in the identification of appropriate tasks and content, the use of blueprints of learning objectives and outcomes and assessment tasks and the translation of task performance into marks (or grades or punts) are required, as well as the approaches provide by statistical analysis.

The underlying concepts of reliability and validity in psychology and education are both based on the notion of precision and accuracy.  A useful analogy is telling the time from the watch.  The mechanism of a watch may be precise (reliable), it may measure the minutes and hours consistently, but the time shown may be wrong.  The time shown by a watch on a particular occasion may be correct (valid) but the watch may have stopped or its variable rate of loss or gain rather than its consistency may have provided the result.  There is a further variable involved in telling the time from a watch: the observer.  He/she has to be able to interpreting the results of an examination, test, or coursework assignment.  Even if checklist, guidelines or rating schedules are provided, ultimately the assessment instrument is the person in conjunction with the particular checklist or procedure.