Analysis of Turkish high-school physics-examination questions according to Bloom’s taxonomy

The study was carried out in seven high schools (student age: 14-17) in the province Diyarbakır in Turkey: three ‘Ordinary’ high schools, two ‘Vocational and Commercial’ high schools; one ‘Anatolian’ high school and one ‘Science’ high school, which were randomly chosen in Diyarbakır. Ordinary High Schools (OHS) are well known as public high school and students are enrolled to these high schools without any entrance examinations. Vocational and Commercial High Schools (VCHS) usually accept students who try to enter profession early without graduating university. Anatolian High Schools (AHS) and Science High Schools (SHS) accept students by means of a nation-wide selection examination (LGS\OGS). Usually, bright pupils are able to enrol these schools. Almost in each city, there is one AHS. However, in big cities, there are more than one AHS. Besides, there is not one SHS in every cities because of its elite.

Eight hundred seventy six (876) written-exam questions asked by 19 physics teachers in these schools during two academic terms of 2005 were collected by the researchers. These questions were analysed in terms of the stages of the cognitive domain. Cognitive behaviour consists of cognitive skills and related activities. According to Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives, the cognitive domain is organised into six levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation (Bloom, 1956). Aims and questions classified according to levels of cognitive domain, together with comments on each question, are summarised in the Appendix.

In the analysis process, the authors and the other physics education expert have analysed each question according to Bloom’s Taxonomy. It was found that these three academicians had a high consensus on the levels of the questions. Afterwards, OSS questions were also classified according to the cognitive levels of BT. Both the frequencies of the cognitive levels of physics exam questions and the OSS physics questions in 2005 were compared as of years. Finally, the significance of connections between OSS (2005) and high school physics questions was researched by statistical analyses.