Applying the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain to Linux System Administration Assessments

The Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy has been used by educators, regardless of the discipline being taught, to characterize learning outcomes and their assessments. Such efforts help identify the cognitive requirements of a given examination or the expectations of a learning module. Despite having become a de facto standard, the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy is not trivial to apply. Education researchers are often in the best position to understand the subtle differences between taxonomy categories, but they often lack the discipline-specific knowledge to map the taxonomy’s categories to assignments or questions. This problem suggests that education research on the application of the revised taxonomy should be multi-disciplinary, involving both education and discipline-based education researchers. This paper summarizes the experience acquired by the CEReAL group – Computing Education Research at Lakeland – as it leveraged the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy to categorize quizzes and assignments used in an Introduction to Linux course. We detail the specifics of the task, discuss the rules which governed our categorization process, and highlight scenarios where the taxonomy did not apply straightforwardly.