An exploration of Bloom´s knowledge, skills, and affective-based goals in promoting development of freshmen engineering students´ professional identities

Engineering educators rely on taxonomies such as Bloom´s taxonomy to create learning objectives used to develop course syllabi and activities. Many times, faculty use these learning objectives to assess student attainment of engineering competencies as they relate to Engineering Accreditation Criteria (Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology-ABET) purposes. One flaw to this approach is that it fundamentally assumes that student performance and completion of an engineering course will reflect the level or extent of professional development by the engineering student. Furthermore, it assumes that through development of a professional competency, students will more readily identify with the engineering profession. The purpose of this work is to explore the extent by which Bloom´s taxonomy promotes development of freshmen engineering students´ professional identities in an entry level undergraduate engineering course. A lower-level engineering course was selected as studies suggest that attrition and drop-out tends to occur between the first and second year of an engineering degree. From this work, we will begin to shed light on the needs and areas of improvement for freshmen engineering curriculum design (specifically related to selection of curriculum objectives) to promote persistent and committed professional identities in engineering students.