Cognitive Learning Objectives And New Educators:Techniques For Navigating The Early Years And Ec2000

The current engineering education environment presents many challenges to the new engineering educator including simultaneously navigating outcomes-based accreditation, learning how to teach, and conducting technical and/or educational research. Although obscured at times, learning is the ultimate desired outcome of each of these. This paper describes techniques for using cognitive learning objectives to both enhance and measure student learning, i.e., student achievement of course and program outcomes. These techniques may not require significant additional time on the part of the instructor. Rather, preparation time may even decrease. These techniques have been learned by the author through participating in various NSF, ASEE, and ASCE sponsored teaching workshops during the past four years. In particular, this paper summarizes Bloom’s Taxonomy for cognitive learning objectives, describes how to use these for writing both course and lesson objectives, how to organize and design course work consistent with the stated objectives, and then use these objectives as a guide for measuring student learning.