First year courses in IT : a Bloom rating

This paper explores the cognitive difficulty of assessment tasks in six first year computing courses within an Information Technology IT degree. This issue is pertinent to Information Technology education for two reasons. Degree level education in any field of study is expected to develop higher order thinking skills. Bloom’s taxonomy is a framework which can be used to identify different levels of thinking skills. It calibrates ascending cognitive levels from the lowest, knowledge involving the recall of facts, to the highest, evaluation, which involves the comparative assessment of outcomes. Bloom’s taxonomy can be used as a guide to designing a course of a requisite level. Bloom’s taxonomy can also be used to calibrate the level of a particular assessment task retrospectively. Both approaches can be used for course planning and evaluation purposes, and, since a degree programme is simply a collection of courses, it is also possible to plan and measure at this level.This paper follows the second tactic, as the analysis presented in the paper is based on the assessment components of the courses studied. This approach requires the researcher to self-reflecton the mental processes he or she would use to answer each question (or part question) in each item of assessment and to register the Bloom level of the processes used. Bloom levels range from 1 to 6 and the Bloom rating for a course is the weighted average of the Bloom levels assigned to each assessment question. We calculate a Bloom rating for each of the courses involved in the study. This paper extends earlier work that examined the cognitive difficulty of two streams of three courses in an IT degree: a programming stream and a data communications and networking (DCN) stream. It was anticipated that within each stream there would be an increase in Bloom rating as the year level of a course advanced, since it was thought that later year courses would require higher level thinking skills than beginning ones. This expected gradient in Bloom ratings from early to later years was not confirmed by the analysis. The most striking feature of that analysis was a concentration of Bloom ratings for each stream and the wide difference between them. The Bloom rating for programming courses were considerably higher than those in the DCN stream despite their placement at lower year levels in the degree.