In 1956, reseаrcher Benjаmin Blооm аnd an appоinted committee designed a classification system for assessment (e.g., exam) items. The system was based on the skills required to correctly answer any item. The pyramid below indicates the latest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy from easiest at the bottom to hardest at the top:At the bottom level, “Remember”, students simply have to regurgitate from memory, words or definitions. “Understand” implies that a certain level of conceptual understanding is required to answer the question, but the skills necessary are rather simplistic. Items from “Apply” to “Create” require critical thinking skills as well as content knowledge and are much more challenging to students. Other researchers have shown that students often (in fact, almost always) tailor their learning and studying efforts to only cover what is on the exam. Therefore, it follows that exams requiring thinking skills and content knowledge, rather than just rote memorization, would encourage students to master deeper understanding of the material in preparation for the exams. To test this, researchers set up two sections of an introductory biology course. One section took all exams written solely at the knowledge level (memorization only) and the other section took all exams written entirely at higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. At the end of the semester, both sections took a common final exam assessing their content knowledge as well as their reasoning skills. Results are shown in the table below: Treatment * indicates a p-value < .05 Low-level Exams High-level Exams Average Final Exam Percentage 61.7% 67.5% * Average performance on low-level questions on the Final Exam (those requiring only memorization) 57.9% 57.1% Average performance on high-level questions on the Final Exam (those requiring both content and skills) 39.6% 44.0% * What hypothesis were researchers testing in this experiment?
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