Appraising Pre-service EFL Teachers' Assessment in Language Testing Course Using Revised Bloom's Taxonomy

Abstract

The teachers need to be conceived as a "change agent" and not as a mere transmitter of knowledge and culture. In developing countries like Iran, one of the most significant concerns in the field of teachers' education is efficiency of pre-service programs. To this aim, the current descriptive-evaluative study intended to describe the state of pre-service teachers' assessment in the field of language testing by (a) examining the exam questions to find out whether they are aligned with curriculum objectives and syllabus (content validity, (b) exploring whether they take care of higher order cognitive processes and (c) finding what combinations of cognitive process levels and knowledge types in Revised Bloom's Taxonomy are prevalent in the questions. The results exhibited an unbalanced coverage of content in exams. Also the questions were found to be inadequate in terms of measuring complex cognitive skills (Analyze and Evaluate); Remember and Understand domains take up 91.6 % of all questions and no item was found for Create. Three combinations of cognitive process level and knowledge type was dominant in the data set: (1) Remember Factual Knowledge, (2) Understand Conceptual Knowledge, and (3) Apply Procedural Knowledge. These associations confirm the Anderson and Krathwohl's (2001) proposition.

The Effects of Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy Enriched Instruction on EFL Learners’ Writing Performance in an Academic Writing Course

“…He also asserts that progressing with a well-planned curriculum increases students' engagement, so their self-confidence improves correspondingly. In the same vein, Mohammadi et al (2015) points out that RBT increases the chance to ask relevant and coherent questions in the exam because it underlines the specific verbs to shape the questions in each level. They reiterate that it can be inevitable to ask questions beyond students' capabilities if RBT has been disregarded.…”

“…It other words, it highlights the importance of having a strong foundation at first to meet the needs of higher order thinking skills in the subsequent phase. Some advocates (Mohammadi, 2015;Pratiwi, 2015;Mizbani, 2020) and opponents (Sonmez, 2019;Muhayimana et al, 2022) of RBT have been prevalent with their genuine opinions to justify. For instance, Ulum (2022) elucidates that RBT facilitates learning and teaching process in reading classes because it does not force the learners and teachers to figure out and teach rapidly.…”

The Assessment of Higher-order Thinking Skills in Online EFL Courses

“…Analyze, Evaluate, and Create, of the taxonomy are commonly considered to be encompassed within the term higher-order thinking. Several studies have been carried out with the aim of identifying higher-order thinking tasks in the EFL classroom that rely on the top three levels of Bloom's taxonomy or the revised taxonomy to define HOTS (Riazi 2010;Ali 2012;Mohammadi et al 2015).…”