Bloom's taxonomy in software engineering education: A systematic mapping study

Abstract

Designing and assessing learning outcomes could be a challenging activity for any Software Engineering (SE) educator. To support the process of designing and assessing SE courses, educators have been applied the cognitive domain of Bloom's taxonomy. However, to the best of our knowledge, the evidence on the usage of Bloom's taxonomy in SE higher education has not yet been systematically aggregated or reviewed. Therefore, in this paper we report the state of the art on the usage of Bloom's taxonomy in SE education, identified by conducted a systematic mapping study. As a result of the performed systematic mapping study, 26 studies were deemed as relevant. The main findings from these studies are: i) Bloom's taxonomy has mostly been applied at undergraduate level for both design and assessment of software engineering courses; ii) software construction is the leading SE subarea in which Bloom's taxonomy has been applied. The results clearly point out the usefulness of Bloom's taxonomy in the SE education context. We intend to use the results from this systematic mapping study to develop a set of guidelines to support the usage of Bloom's taxonomy cognitive levels to design and assess SE courses.