2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work-in-progress paper examines the effect of modified assignments with Bloom’s Taxonomy-based questions on students’ learning and metacognition. In undergraduate engineering courses, most textbook problems and assignments are designed to evaluate the ability of students to recall facts and basic concepts, and apply these concepts to solve numerical problems. Based on the authors’ instructional experiences, these assignments are typically insufficient to facilitate and gauge students’ learning. Through these assignments, students might develop problem-solving skills, partially through pattern-based recognition, but are often unable to gain a strong grasp over concepts or apply them to contexts beyond the class. A lack of complete understanding of fundamental undergraduate concepts can adversely affect students’ learning in the long term, their knowledge retention, and ability to succeed in their engineering careers. In this study, assignments on several topics in a large undergraduate fluid mechanics course, including homework, in-class activities, and quizzes, were revised to inclusively cover problems at five different Bloom’s Taxonomy cognitive levels: remember, understand, apply, analyze, and evaluate. Preliminary results indicate that regardless of the teaching approach (instructor-centered or student-centered), students generally performed well on problems in the remember and apply cognitive domains in the formative assessments. However, students from the instructor-centered group underperformed on questions at the understanding and the evaluating levels. When students in a different class section participated in the in-class activities and completed homework that included Bloom’s Taxonomy questions in an active learning environment, they showed significant improvement in their understanding and performance in a summative assessment (midterm exams). Overall, our present findings suggest that a minimal revision of assignments with attentive design to include problems addressing various Bloom’s Taxonomy levels in an active learning class could promote students’ learning. Although these teaching innovations do not significantly impact students’ metacognition, most students found that the modified class structure and the revised class assignments were beneficial to their learning process.