Geoscience Curriculum: Approach Through Learning Taxonomy and Outcome Based Education

Abstract

Learning outcomes are inevitably to be declared by any university and educational institution at every level of their programmes. It should have a general scheme for all programmes regardless of the discipline specificities, individual courses or even independent instructional units. Such outcomes are stated at different levels based on the taxonomy of learning adopted in each scheme. People follow different learning taxonomies for stating course contents, designing the assessment items and measuring the attainment. In this work, revised Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001) has been adopted as a classic model to express different cognitive levels in outcome statements and assessment items. This has been demonstrated here based on an 80 credit postgraduate programme in geology offered by state universities and autonomous institutions. This article presents outcome statements and assessment items for three courses of the programme, namely (a) Biostratigraphy and Palaeontology, (b) Metamorphic Petrology and (c) Structural Geology, which can be ideal specimen for adopting the learning taxonomy and outcome-based education in any similar disciplines of educational programmes.