ACCELERATING LEARNING OUTCOMES WITH BLOOMS TAXONOMY Boone Bradley

ACCELERATING LEARNING OUTCOMES WITH BLOOM’S TAXONOMY Boone Bradley Finance—School of Business Background Finance 450: Finance – Applied Portfolio Management is an elective open to any KU student who successfully applies to the course, but it is typically finance students within the School of Business. Enrollment is typically capped at 25 students per semester, and often a mix of undergraduate and graduate students. Over the past few years, the student population has largely been undergraduate students. Student Performance Below is a chart that represents the grade ranges at the mid-point of the 2020 Spring Semester vs the prior four semesters: Issues to Address My BPI course transformation sought to accomplish the following tasks: • Accelerate desired learning outcomes • Create meaningful standard deviation of grades given by myself and TAs Overall, the course transformation intended to incorporate the scaffolding process of Bloom’s taxonomy in both instruction and assessment. Elements of Implementation Achieving these goals required extensive revision of the grading rubrics for major assignments and utilizing surveys throughout the semester to assess student learning and performance. A sample rubric designed according to the principles of Bloom’s Taxonomy is presented in the following column. Instructor Reflections Implementing BPI changes contributed to faster acceleration to desired outcome grades (about 7 out of 10) but no immediately apparent improvement in the final grades of the semester. Perhaps more importantly, we’ve seen a meaningful improvement in the standard deviation of grades given by myself and TAs, indicating the BPI changes have had an impact on reducing the “mixed signals” student might receive via their grades. This effect is most significant in early weeks (on “poor” student work) and might indicate with the average grade data I need to spend more time documenting what makes “excellent” work to improve and standardize those grades. This project was supported by CTE’s 2019 Best Practices Institute