What Do Engineers Want? Examining Engineering Education through Bloom's Taxonomy

Using Bloom's taxonomy as the basis for an empirical investigation, this paper examines what engineering students and professionals want from engineering education. Fifty engineering students, from Computer Science and Information Technology courses, were asked to rank activity verbs in order of their impression about frequency of their occurrence in their assignments and examinations. Another group of sixteen students was asked to rank activity verbs as per their learning effectiveness. Thirteen professional Engineers were also asked to assign ranking to activity verbs in order of their perceived importance. A set of fifteen examination papers were then scrutinized for the usage of these activity verbs. Data analysis revealed that there is high correlation between students' impression and examination papers. It also demonstrated that there is high correlation between what engineering students and professionals want. However, a negative correlation was discovered between what students and professional engineers want and the activity verbs used in evaluative and non-evaluative tasks. Other established criterion for imparting good engineering education, such as the guidelines provided by ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) are discussed in light of the findings of this study. We conclude that, to foster creativity, critical thinking and innovative problem solving amongst engineering students we need to develop flexible curricula that aim to engage the students in higher-level cognitive activities. Changing the verb set used by engineering educators can be employed as a catalyst to facilitate this strategic transformation in engineering curriculum. (Contains 4 tables.)