Bloom´s taxonomy in software engineering education: A systematic mapping study

Designing and assessing learning outcomes could be a challenging activity for any Software Engineering (SE) educator. To support the process of designing and assessing SE courses, educators have been applied the cognitive domain of Bloom´s taxonomy. However, to the best of our knowledge, the evidence on the usage of Bloom´s taxonomy in SE higher education has not yet been systematically aggregated or reviewed. Therefore, in this paper we report the state of the art on the usage of Bloom´s taxonomy in SE education, identified by conducted a systematic mapping study. As a result of the performed systematic mapping study, 26 studies were deemed as relevant. The main findings from these studies are: i) Bloom´s taxonomy has mostly been applied at undergraduate level for both design and assessment of software engineering courses; ii) software construction is the leading SE subarea in which Bloom´s taxonomy has been applied. The results clearly point out the usefulness of Bloom´s taxonomy in the SE education context. We intend to use the results from this systematic mapping study to develop a set of guidelines to support the usage of Bloom´s taxonomy cognitive levels to design and assess SE courses.