Work in Progress - Using Bloom´s Taxonomy as a Format for Self-Evaluation of Design Education Activities II

We have developed a "design structured teardown process" (DSTP) as a means of introducing design skills to beginning engineering students, and have applied Bloom\´s taxonomy to evaluate the associated activities and exercises. This work summarizes assessment instruments and an experiment with a small sample of students, and extends preliminary work reported at the FIE 2004 conference. The objectives were to determine if the skills acquired from the DSTP were helpful in a redesign exercise, and to provide feedback for improving the activities and exercises. Each exercise was presumed to convey skill and knowledge associated with a cell in Bloom\´s taxonomy, and then presumed to contribute to the redesign exercise. While the sample was too small to draw conclusions regarding design skills, we found several activities that had few related exercises and some that did not use the skills but just explain, which in Bloom\´s terms is apply vs. understanding