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.