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Top1. Introduction
Experience is the result of a relatively permanent alteration of behaviour that is termed as learning. Learning also includes the procurement of new knowledge, skills and values. It occurs as a result of conditioning, playing and experiencing. Reinforced practice can result in a lasting change in behavioural potentiality which is otherwise termed as learning (Olson & Hergenhahn, 2013). Unlike ‘Learning’, knowledge involves the familiarity, awareness, or understanding of someone or something. Knowledge is about realities, information, descriptions, or skills, which can be got through experience or education by observing, realizing, or learning. Knowledge acquired by a learner differs from person to person based on their cognitive levels. In order to understand the same, Bloom has categorized the levels of human cognition as thinking, learning and understanding (Forehand, 2009). He proposed taxonomy to evaluate the level of knowledge achieved by a learner. This taxonomy determines the level of educational objectives in three domains namely cognitive, affective and psychomotor.
The purposes of these domains are to enable the learner to acquire knowledge and intellect through the cognitive domain, attitude through the affective domain and the ability to accentuate physical activities and skills through the psychomotor domain.
This research article focuses on the cognitive domain which is aimed to evaluate the learning levels of students based on ‘Bloom’s Taxonomy’. The application of this method categories the learning into three different levels of cognition namely; low, middle and high. The lower order of cognition comprises of the students’ ability to recognize, recall and understand facts. The middle order emphasizes on the students’ ability to apply facts, rules and concepts. The higher order of cognition focuses on the students’ ability to judge and scientifically evaluate facts, values or create new theories or concepts. The hierarchical structure of the cognitive domain is styled in Figure 1.
In incorporating the said model, the study resonate its focus on the educational constrictions which included setting parameters to evaluate the learning outcome of students based on their knowledge gained and academic performance acquired via classroom learning and lab activity.
Examination and evaluation are the two key practices in any higher educational institution. This research article encompasses a scientific method with the help of a software application ‘QAUDIT’ to check whether a question paper used to evaluate the learning outcome of students’ has covered all the cognitive levels pertaining toBloom’s Taxonomy.
The QAUDIT application developed uses the text mining method to find terms or words pertaining to each question in any given question paper. Text extraction and text categorization mechanism are also employed in the application. Using the proposed method, a case study was conducted at Sacred Heart College and the results are tabulated.
Further, the research article is structured as follows: Section2 portrays relevant related research works carried out on various studies pertaining to question paper analysis using Bloom’s Taxonomy. The text mining method is explained in section 3. In section 4, the architecture of QAUDIT application designed to do the question paper analysis is dealt with, and followed by the case study conducted at Sacred Heart College in section 5. Section 6 discusses key suggestions for both students and faculty. Finally, in section 7 the conclusive summarization of the research undertaken is elaborated.
TopBloom’s Cognitive Levels are used in numerous educational domains to improve the teaching- learning process. It gives a very discerning insight on learning and so it is considered as an evaluation system for learning processes.