Experience of Applying Bloom's Taxonomy in Three Courses 

Philip Machanick

Department of Computer Science, University of the Witwatersrand
2050 Wits, South Africa
philip@cs.wits.ac.za


A commonly accepted taxonomy of cognitive skills, Bloom9s Taxonomy,
puts analysis and synthesis near the top, with straightforward
knowledge and comprehension at the bottom. Typical Computer Science
curriculum discussion, though, usually focuses on which concepts to
teach when, not on how to rank concepts or teaching methods for level
of difficulty in terms of cognitive skills. This paper presents
experiences of applying these ideas to teaching three very different
Computer Science courses. These experiences suggest that taking
Bloom9s Taxonomy into account in course design is worthwhile.