Teaching and Assessing Basic Concepts to Advanced Applications: Using Bloom's Taxonomy to Inform Graduate Course Design

ABSTRACT Graduate students expect to draw on their experience and expertise to participate in high level discussions and engage in advanced applications of the course material. However the varied backgrounds of the students frequently necessitate a review of the basic concepts in order for the class to have a common understanding and vocabulary. The instructor's challenge is to design a course that can progress from basic concepts to advanced applications within a single semester. In this paper, Bloom's Taxonomy of educational objectives is utilized to guide course design and assessment considerations. The development of a core MBA level organizational behavior course will serve as an example. INTRODUCTION Graduate programs are an important part of our universities mix of offerings. The lead graduate program associated with business education is the MBA degree. Typical MBA programs have a number of core courses that are part of every student' s curriculum regardless of concentration. Although some courses can be waived for some students, many students cannot meet the criteria to be waived and most programs have 'upper core' courses that cannot be waived. Given the wide range of knowledge, skills and abilities of students taking these courses it is necessary to start with the basics in core courses. The primary challenge for the instructor is to move from delivery of basic knowledge to sophisticated meaningful discussion in the time span of a single semester, and the secondary challenge is to assess the steps along the way. This paper starts with a brief discussion of these challenges. Next will be a description of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, which is used as a guide for the next section - an approach to designing a course. A graduate level organizational behavior course will be used as an example. The paper concludes with a suggestion that this approach can be used for designing other college courses and perhaps entire curricula. THE CHALLENGE OF TEACHING AT MANY LEVELS Some graduate programs require students to have a significant background in the discipline before being accepted into the program. Other programs including many MBA programs, accept students that do not have a significant prior background in the discipline. When the student body has mixed knowledge, skills, abilities and experience, the challenge to the course/curriculum designer is to play 'catch-up' and bring the deficient students through a range of information and skills, while keeping the course worthwhile and meaningful to better prepared students. There are several ways to deal with this challenge. One way is to avoid the situation by either requiring a requisite amount of basic business knowledge before acceptance or limiting basic knowledge to lower core courses that can be waived by students with the knowledge, skills, abilities and/or experience. Another approach is to simplify things and omit potentially important issues. A third approach is to carefully design the course this challenge in mind. Such an approach will be explained shortly, but first we need to review the learning concepts that will form the basis of our design approach. BLOOM'S TAXONOMY In 1956, a group headed by Benjamin S. Bloom, after working on a project since 1 949, finally published what is now known as 'Bloom's Taxonomy' (Bloom, 1956). It was originally intended to help instructors measure learning by providing guidelines as to what can be expected from instruction. The taxonomy (Appendix 1) has six levels - Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation. The typology was originally meant to help develop rubrics and measure learning (Bloom, 1 956; Krathwohl, 2002). It is still used in its original form, however there are occasional modifications (i.e. Christopher, Thomas & Tallent-Runnels, 2004), revisions (i.e. Krathwohl, 2002) and alternative typologies proposed (i. …