Month: January 2016

Name That Tune

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I have always been fascinated by how our brains work.  Specifically, how my brain can remember all the lyrics from songs in the 1970’s but can’t remember a conversation I had in the hallway with a colleague 20 minutes ago.  I am the perfect lifeline if you are on a game show and need someone to sing “Midnight Train to Georgia” or “More than a Feeling”. At this year’s Regional Community College Assessment Conference on April 22 (#RCCAC16) at JCCC, Heather Seitz, Associate Professor in Microbiology at JCCC, will share her own contribution to national research. In her breakout session on using concept inventories for measuring student learning gains in the classroom, Professor Seitz will provide an overview of the history of concept inventories and discuss the process for creating them. Faculty can use concept inventories to measure the impact of teaching and compare their students’ successes with national data.  Professor Seitz will be sharing some very interesting research as well Continue reading Name That Tune→

Back to Basics: Revisiting Bloom’s Taxonomy

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A common challenge in college teaching is keeping course objectives, program outcomes and classroom assessments in alignment. As we construct our assessment instruments, course assignments, and test questions, are we also considering where on the cognitive ladder we are asking our students to think? In 1956, Benjamin Bloom headed a group of educational psychologists who developed a classification of three domains:  Cognitive: mental skills (Knowledge), Affective: growth in feelings or emotional areas (Attitude), Psychomotor: manual or physical skills (Skills). Within this cognitive domain, Bloom identified six levels from the simple recall or recognition of facts at the bottom level through increasingly more complex and abstract mental levels to the highest order thinking characterized as evaluation.  This representation of the levels of thinking is widely known in education circles as “Bloom’s Taxonomy.” Figure 1 – Original version of Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy Bloom found that over 95 % of the test questions students encountered in the classroom require them to think only Continue reading Back to Basics: Revisiting Bloom’s Taxonomy→