A novel web-based educational assessment system with Bloom’s taxonomy

In past decades, student learning outcomes have been evaluated through graded assignments and tests by most paper-based assessment systems. Without a systematic and accurate categorization of test knowledge levels, these commonly used systems are limited to find out the details about student learning outcomes simply through assigned grades, thus cannot determine whether students are attaining our course goals or not, i.e., a simple test grade cannot tell us to what degree a student understands the class contents. Moreover, paper-based systems cannot produce immediate and personalized assessments, thus cannot help eliminating student uncertainties and improving education practices promptly. This paper presents a webbased educational assessment system to solve these problems by applying Bloom’s taxonomy to evaluate student learning outcomes and teacher instructional practices in real time. The system performance is rather encouraging with experimentation in science and mathematics courses of two local high schools.