CASE STUDY ON C-PROGRAMMING QUESTIONS FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF BLOOMS COGNITIVE LEVEL

Current education system is changing dynamically to bring out various skills of students/ learners. To make sure the learner learn what they ought to, Outcome based education is being adopted in higher education institutions. Educationalists suggest that assessment must be in such a way to evaluate different cognitive level of the students as proposed by Bloom. But still some gap prevails on how to set questions to check different cognitive levels of the students. This paper is intended to study how the question papers are set, taking “Computer Programming Course” as example and suggest few modifications that may be brought into the question papers to assess higher order thinking level of students. Study is made on the questions collected from question papers of different educational institutions and technical examinations. Analysis were made on how the questions are distributed based on the Blooms Taxonomy and the keywords used for constructing the questions. Findings reveal that the questions are not distributed well on the Blooms Taxonomy. Most of the questions fall in the lower order thinking categories. Higher order thinking levels are very much ignored especially in descriptive type questions. Based on the findings few improvements in the question setting were suggested.