Ursula Fuller is a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Kent and Dean of Flexible Learning for the whole University. She was previously Dean of the Faculty of Science, Technology and Medical Studies. Ursula has been involved in four previous ITiCSE working groups, including two as group leader.
Colin Johnson is a senior lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Kent. He is actively involved in research into computing education as well as teaching at the university and leading a number of research projects in the area of bioinformatics.
I work as a research assistant in Tampere University of Technology and work in a large CS1-course. We have used exam questions based on the levels of the original Bloom's taxonomy (Essi has designed these, though). We have also written about a taxonomy of visualization examples to support the different levels of cognitive development. Thus I would say my main background would be in supporting the different levels of learning taxonomies with the use of learning tools, like visualization systems. As the tools are usually much related to the actual coding side, I am interested in more practical aspect: the assignments the students are given and the examples they are provided with. I have a few years of experience in designing these for our course - knowingly using taxonomies.
I have been a Lecturer (i.e. teaching track faculty) of the Computer Science department at Simon Fraser University (SFU), in Vancouver, Canada, since 2004. I earned an Engineering in Computing Science degree from the University of Uruguay and a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence at SFU. I have taught both in Uruguay and in Canada in the Computing Science departments at the mentioned universities for several years. I've always been very passionate about teaching, learning and motivating students, and lately I am involved in several projects involving education research.
One such project is about incorporating learning strategies instruction into first year undergrad courses. This is a collaborative project that I am working on with a colleague at SFU, Donna McGee Thompson. (She is also applying to join the working group). We have worked on this project for a couple of semesters and are very keen in continuing; both of our departments are enthusiastic about our results and potential future implementations. Among other activities, students are introduced to Bloom's taxonomy and are also asked to apply it as part of some course assignments. In particular, we have surveyed students regarding Bloom's levels, similarly to the survey you report.
Another project that I am involved in aims to come up with the learning outcomes for several first year courses in the Computing Science department, as collaborative work among several instructors teaching them. This is an initiative which just started, among others, given several coordination and curriculum revision needs in my department. In principle we were planning to rely on Bloom's language to express the learning outcomes.From an educational point of view, I have taught a course on methodology and technology of programming at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos for five years. Now, I also teach a course on object-oriented programming.
In my experience, learning taxonomies is a useful framework both for the teacher and for the students. By using this framework, teachers can specify more easily educational objectives, practices and methodology. Students can take it into account to better direct their study efforts and to get higher grades in their studies.
In my opinion, integrated programming environments (i.e. including editor, tester, debugger, performance profiler, etc.) are good tools to develop applications but they lack fundamental pedagogical elements for the teaching and the learning of programming. As a consequence, I consider that pedagogical support to design and develop learning tools is necessary. Learning taxonomies can contribute to this advance.
From a research point of view, I am interested in the systematic design of programming learning tools based on Bloom's taxonomy. My main effort has been directed to developed tools for the learning of concepts of object- oriented programming. However, I am also involved in several works to support object-oriented design.
I am a CS teacher at University of Zilina and I do my PhD study at Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava. I worked as a programmer-analyst (in textile industry) then I worked as a secondary school teacher and now I have been teaching at university for 7 years. At present I teach programming in introductory courses of programming. All our first year students have to pass this course. This year we have about 320 students in 16 groups. I am interested in quality of education, efficiency of teaching methods, psychology of programming, pattern languages, virtual learning.
I am interested in participating in WG2 because its programme concerns my pedagogy research. My research interest is efficiency of mastery learning in computer science education. To design tests for mastery learning and/or PSI introductory programming course for first year university students I need to design specific aims. I use the Bloom taxonomy so WG2 proposals are very interesting and challenging for me. So far I have studied taxonomies, mastery learning philosophy, PSI (personalized system of instruction), designing the curriculum and syllabus, test construction and evaluation for my pedagogy research.
I am the responsible teacher of the introductory programming courses in Tampere University of Technology. The courses are: Programming 1 (4 ECTS), about 500 students yearly Programming 2 (5 ECTS), about 300 students yearly The programming language on both the courses is C++.
I am interested in participating in this working group because of my prior research in this area as well as my use of Bloom's taxonomy in teaching Object-Oriented Design (OOD), CS1, and CS2. Within the classroom, I use both Socratic and Constructivist approaches to teaching as well as Bloom's Taxonomy and active learning techniques. I have found that, while some topics lend themselves to Bloom's Taxonomy, more complicated topics (i.e. abstraction, recursion, concurrency, algorithms, etc.) require more specialized teaching strategies. There is a definite need for a CS-specific learning taxonomy.
I have spent several years researching the effects of Bloom's taxonomy, constructivism, and active learning techniques on teaching/learning OOD. While conducting more recent research endeavors on identifying predictors of success in CS education and CS/IT student readiness/preparedness, informally, I have found that teaching/learning styles affect success more than cognitive abilities. I have future plans of performing empirical studies on the effects of teaching/learning on CS/IT student resilience and success.
I am a Senior Lecturer in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
I have had some experience with Bloom's Taxonomy, in particular when I was part of a committee that included faculty from our Teachers College that reformed our CS1/CS2 curriculum. Designing tools such as placement tests employing Bloom's categories was quite challenging and not entirely satisfying. And yet I've guided graduate teaching assistants to considering it or at least learning about it (I have some supervisory responsibilities) in order to do their jobs better.
My name is RoxAnn Stalvey, and I am on the faculty of the College of Charleston Computer Science Department in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. I have been a member of a small group of faculty at my institution that has applied Bloom's taxonomy to the topics lists for CS1, CS2 and CS7. This work led to weekly meetings that continue today. After much discussion of Bloom, we noticed shortcomings with its application. For instance, the taxonomy fails to take into consideration the level of difficulty of problems. How can we express the level of mastery expected for a CS1 student versus a Senior-level student? Questions such as these have led to recent readings and discussions of SOLO. For my experience in applying Bloom, I was invited to join a group of HCI instructors who were developing curricular guidelines for varying levels of HCI courses.
My keen interest in becoming a member of this group relates to my current work involving Bloom's taxonomy in the field of computing science. I would value the opportunity to collaborate with you and other working group participants in critically evaluating the suitability and utility of Bloom's and other learning taxonomies, in relation to computing science, so as to inform and enhance my own theoretical understanding and practice, and to pass the group's conclusions onto others in the field.
The work I refer to above is within my role at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver Canada, where I am the Learning Services Coordinator in the Student Learning Commons. In this role, I develop and deliver classes on a variety of academic success topics. For several years, I have introduced the concept of a learning taxonomy in an number of contexts and disciplines on our campus. Of particular relevance here is my work with faculty members designing resources and teaching learning classes tailored to the needs of their courses. A current and especially pertinent example of such collaboration is the project I am involved with in the School of Computing Science with one of their faculty members, Diana Cukierman, who has also applied to participate in this working group. The purpose of our project is to integrate learning strategies instruction within the regular lab time of computing science courses to support and enhance student learning. My part in this project is, in ongoing cooperation and consultation with the course instructor, to teach academic strategies and theory to students within computing science classes, as applied to the course curriculum. An important component of these classes is to introduce students to a learning taxonomy (in this case, Bloom's) with the goal of encouraging them to recognize and apply appropriate levels of learning to their course exercises and exam preparation. (A common concern I hear from faculty members is that some students, newer ones in particular, apply a level of learning that is not at the level of sophistication required for the task at hand.) To further contextualize and reinforce the content and activities of the learning session, students are given homework requiring them to develop questions based on Bloom's, which are selectively included in the course exam.
The success of our approach has been recognized by the Director of Undergraduate Programs in the School of Computing Science, and the School has integrated my learning strategies classes into further courses in the department. Diana Cukierman and I are also investigating the impact of our approach through empirical methods and will be presenting our preliminary findings at several upcoming conferences.
I am interested in this working group because of my current work in the BRACELet project with the revised Bloom's cognitive taxonomy (Anderson et al. 2001) and the SOLO taxonomy (Biggs and Collis 1982, Biggs 1999). We have submitted a paper to ITiCSE endeavouring to define exemplars for the use of the revised Bloom's taxonomy in relation to novice programming (Thompson et al. 2007).
My earlest work with these taxonomy's began in 1996 while working for The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand where we used a taxonomy (Clift and Stratton 1997) based on Bloom et al. (1956) and Facione (1990). This was used to define the cognitive level for each unit of learning and for each assessment item. In exploring background for that work and my current PhD work, I explored a range of taxonomies including King and Kitchener (1994), and Perry (1968). At Massey University, I have been using the SOLO taxonomy in defining assessment criteria for a range of assignments in the papers that I have been teaching (Thompson 2004, Thompson 2007). I have provided my knowledge in this area to assist the BRACELet team resulting in a series of papers that involve the use of the revised Bloom's taxonomy and the SOLO taxonomy (Lister et al. 2006, Thompson et al. 2006, Whalley et al. 2006) and the submitted paper (Thompson et al. 2007).
My PhD work is based in the College of Education at Massey University and is using phenomenography and variation theory to explore how to improve learning in software development with a specific focus on object-oriented software development. I am currently transcribing interviews in preparation for analysis and writing up later in the year.
I have been a teacher at the university since 1985, first at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and since 1997 at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, both in Spain. I have taught different subject matters on computer programming, namely, functional programming, concurrent programming, object-oriented programming, programming languages, and algorithms. I have also been involved in developing different kinds of educational software for programming education, mainly programming environments, APIs, electronic documentation, tutors, visualizers and animators.
I am currently interested in the use of Bloom's taxonomy as a framework to systematically design assistant/tutor applications for programming. We have been successful in using the taxonomy as a framework to develop several applications. Some of them also were successfully evaluated. Currently, I am the supervisor of a PhD in progress with this objective.
We are also aware of the limitations of Bloom's taxonomy. As a result, we submitted a proposal (currently, under review) of a research project to the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. Its main aim is similar, but more ambitious: to adopt a taxonomy as a framework to systematically design assistant/tutor applications for programming. We propose to use Bloom's taxonomy as a first candidate, but we will consider other taxonomies (SOLO, etc.). Applications will be delivered in three subject matters, namely, object-oriented programming, compilers, and algorithms. For each domain, different levels of the taxonomy will be addressed, including higher levels. Visualization, problem generation and correction, and collaborative work are supporting technologies that will receive special attention when designing applications.
Three years ago we faced how to provide exercises assistance designed in a systematic way for an electronic book. We adopted Bloom's taxonomy as a framework to address such a challenge.
We have also used Bloom's taxonomy as a measure for a short-term evaluation of the learning improvements achieved by animations generated with the WinHIPE system. A finding of this work was that students building animations improved their learning outcomes with respect to students watching animations. The improvement was achieved at the comprehension level and, mainly, at the application level.