Bloom’s Taxonomy is a framework for identifying and organizing what educators want students to learn from a given instructional activity. It was originally conceived to create common learning objectives across courses and departments and to provide educators with standardized language to use when framing learning goals for curricula and comprehensive examinations. Now, Bloom’s taxonomy can be used as a potential model for framing educational objectives within a course and as a guide to structure activities and assessment based on learning goals.

Bloom’s Taxonomy is useful for framing writing instruction in engineering courses as it helps instructors and TAs create assignments that will enhance students’ understanding of important concepts and ideas and enable them to meet the key course objectives.

Objectives created using Bloom’s Taxonomy are based on two dimensions: 1) knowledge and 2) cognitive processes. The knowledge dimension indicates the type of content or subject matter that students will work with, while the cognitive processes dimension dictates what students will have to do with that content (the tasks they will have to perform as they think and write). Below we provide two lists that break down the knowledge and cognitive process dimensions and then a table that shows how the two dimensions work together:

Instructors and TAs can use the table shown above to create prompts that ask students to perform specific writing tasks that address different types of content or knowledge taught within the course.

When writing exercises are used in an engineering course, any standard calculation-based homework problem can be leveraged to target different levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Below we provide one example, taken from a Purdue fluid mechanics course, which illustrates this expansion with the use of writing prompts:

You’ll notice that all the prompts that follow use one of the tasks from the cognitive processes dimension list, and then identify specific content (knowledge) that students should engage with.