Presenter:
Sharon L. Bell, The University of North Carolina at Pembroke
Description:
This session will give accounting educators the opportunity to discover if their teaching style and testing methods correspond to specific cognitive objectives for students. The focus of the presentation will be Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy organized as an hierarchy of six learning levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Explanations of each of the cognitive objectives of learning will be provided. This forum will help faculty to identify teaching and testing methods to target specific levels of learning. By targeting specific cognitive levels through appropriate assignments and test questions, students should develop higher-level critical-thinking skills. Faculty will learn how to use verbs that correspond to learning levels to prepare lectures, assignments, and tests that converge on the desired learning level. Accounting educators will also learn how to present Bloom’s Pyramid of Learning to students. The motivation for using Bloom’s taxonomy is to help students better understand how knowledge is acquired in layers and to present students with a framework to aid in critical thinking. Mastering the lower levels of the learning hierarchy is a prerequisite to using the higher levels. To be successful in accounting, students must understand that accounting requires synthesis and evaluation, the higher level thinking skills.
