RESEARCH QUESTION

In an attempt to better understand and better prepare students for the transition from high school to college, a research study was designed to investigate: how do high school students with expected proficiency levels and first-year college students approach and engage in analysis tasks?

RATIONALE

According to Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, levels of critical thinking range from remember to create.    The students at Graham High School, and many at Elon University, tend to work most comfortably in the bottom three levels of Bloom's revised taxonomy (remember, understand, and apply).  As educators, we hope to be able to determine at what point in the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy levels of critical thinking students struggle so that we can gain insight into how to improve our teaching with a goal to improve student analysis assessment capabilities moving students from remembering, understanding, and applying to higher levels of critical thinking (analyzing, evaluating, and creating). 

Figure 1: Revised Bloom's Taxonomy diagram indicating the move from lower level critical thinking skills (level 1 - 3) to higher level thinking skils (level 4 - 6).  Diagram adapted from Anderson and Krathwohl ( Anderson, L. W. and David R. Krathwohl, D. R., et al (Eds..) (2001) A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Allyn & Bacon. Boston, MA (Pearson Education Group).  http://english.waketech.edu/.

Correlating the results for high school students and college students will allow high school teachers to better prepare their students to enter into college as well as allow college professors to better assist their students as they transition into college level work.  Potential benefits of conducting this research include: encouraging students to use higher order thinking skills, specifically focusing on analysis; determining the point in the problem solving process where students struggle; improving teaching in order to improve student analysis capabilities.  The overall goal of this research is to understand the key stumbling block(s) that students at different grade levels have in analyzing information.

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