Framing Questions to Attain Higher Educational Objectives (Educator´s Corner)

The principal purpose of this article is to help engineering teachers improve the exercises and problems they use in classroom activities, homework assignments, and tests, and which are the dominant learning vehicles in much of engineering education. The intimate relationship between classroom problems and educational objectives is elucidated through the recently revised Bloom´s taxonomy of cognitive skills, which organizes the learners´ abilities in a hierarchy with six major categories and emphasizes the importance of attaining the higher-level abilities. The selection and construction of problems to reach a wider set of educational objectives is described in detail and illustrated through problems taken from the topic of noise figure of cascaded linear two-port networks to demonstrate how different cognitive abilities can be exercised within the same subject matter.