Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy across the Learning Objectives in English Translation Curricula

Abstract

Developing critical thinking is among the most appreciated objectives in academic programs. The present study examined the undergraduate and graduate English Translation curricula of Iran's higher education (known as Sarfasl) based on Bloom's Revised Taxonomy (BRT) to find the degree to which levels of BRT were reflected in the curricula. To this end, content analysis was carried out to determine the frequency and proportion of the objectives associated with knowledge (factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive) and cognitive (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create) dimensions. The results revealed that in both curricula, the proportion of lower-order thinking skills (i.e., remember, understand, and apply) were emphasized more than the higher-order ones (i.e., analyze, evaluate, and create) in general. The results also showed that the most frequent objective in terms of the knowledge domain was the category of understand in both curricula. With regard to knowledge dimension, conceptual knowledge occurred most often, confirming that acquiring knowledge acts as a benchmark in educational quality assurance for curriculum designers. In addition, it was found that the metacognitive-related categories were mostly missing and understand/conceptual category had a dominant role in both curricula. The findings imply that the existing curricula need to be re-structured to reflect critical thinking including both knowledge and cognitive domains to facilitate learner autonomy.