Domain Testing: Divide and Conquer - Testing Education

Keeping the questionnaires anonymous helps the learners freely express
themselves. This might also help to determine if a learner’s poor performance was
due to their own attitude and effort or something lacking in the instruction.
However, it would be very difficult to analyze the responses since anonymity does
not guarantee that the responses will be accurate. Also, if one learner’s response
was very negative and one learner failed the class, there is really no way to prove
that these two learners are one and the same. It is quite possible that a student who
aced the test might not have really enjoyed the class, or one who enjoyed the class
actually did fail.
In general, questionnaires help to measure learners’ overall attitudes
towards the instruction and find out on an average what the learners’ opinions
about the instruction are. It is also helpful to see if the overall responses are
synchronized with the overall performance, or if there is just something
outstandingly different about the attitudes when compared with the performance.
However, questionnaires might not always be useful for deducing specific
correlations between attitude and performance of individual learners.
3.02.06 Taxonomy of Learning Levels
The taxonomy of learning levels proposed by Benjamin Bloom, Gagne’s
contemporary, falls within the cognitive domain of learning outcome--one of the
three learning levels described by Gagne (Bloom et al., 1971; Driscoll, 2000).
The following is a brief description of the taxonomy of learning levels,
popularly known as Bloom’s Taxonomy (Anderson et al., 2001; Bloom et al., 1971;
Driscoll, 2000; Learning Skills Program, 2003; Krathwohn et al., 1956; Reiser &
Dempsey, 2002).
• Knowledge: This is the ability to recall knowledge and information
presented during an instruction. Being able to define domain testing-related
terms such as equivalence class analysis, boundary value analysis and all
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