Open AccessA review of the final and supplementary Grade 12 physics examinations from 2014 to 2018 based on a modified Bloom’s taxonomy.
Author(s) -
Nishaal Bhaw,
Jeanne Kriek
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of physics. conference series
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.21
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1742-6596
pISSN - 1742-6588
DOI - 10.1088/1742-6596/1512/1/012008
Subject(s) - summative assessment , physical science , nonprobability sampling , taxonomy (biology) , curriculum , mathematics education , certificate , comprehension , psychology , computer science , pedagogy , biology , sociology , formative assessment , population , ecology , algorithm , demography , programming language
The South African National Department of Basic Education (DBE) has associated the poor pass rate in the National Senior Certificate (NSC) Physical Sciences to the learners’ lack of practical work and the inability to solve problems by integrating their knowledge from different topics in Physical Sciences. Given that the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) is central to the planning, organising and teaching of Physical Sciences, the poor performance in the Grade 12 Physical Sciences: Physics (P1) may be due to a disjointed alignment between the CAPS and the P1. A purposive sampling procedure included the CAPS Grades 10–12 Physical Sciences document; the Physical Sciences Examination Guidelines Grade 12 documents and the final and supplementary P1 examinations for the period starting November 2014 to March 2018. A summative content analysis research technique was conducted using the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum (SEC) research method. The SEC method employed the use of the four topics of Physics and the four non-hierarchical levels of cognitive demand as described in the modified version of Bloom’s taxonomy. The results of this study indicated that the CAPS had a higher proportion of recall based content than the P1, the CAPS, and the P1 had approximately equal proportions of comprehension based content, the CAPS had a lower proportion of application and analysis based content than the P1, and the CAPS, as well as the P1, did not contain any synthesis and evaluation based content. In terms of Bloom’s taxonomy, the CAPS may be classified as promoting lower order thinking skills, and the P1 may be classified as promoting higher order thinking skills.