The cognitive emphasis of instruction as demonstrated by *assessment practices

The American community college provides students from all socioeconomic, academic, and professional backgrounds an opportunity to take advantage of higher education opportunities to support personal and professional development. With the advancement of technology, many students are able to earn degrees at a distance. Because many students are ill-prepared, there is understandable concern about the usefulness and quality of courses that offer limited faculty-student interaction. Given these factors and the significant difference in the classroom and distance learning environments, it is important to determine whether assessment practices in both environments truly support the development of critical thinking skills. The purpose of this study was to compare the cognitive emphasis of traditional and distance learning courses by looking at the cognitive emphasis of the assessment components. Since the development of critical thinking skills is considered a primary goal of many educational programs, academic challenges were analyzed to determine their cognitive emphasis. While the literature on critical thinking includes an array of definitions, this study used the Bloom taxonomy (Bloom et al., 1956) to support the analysis of the cognitive levels of test items. The course syllabus, the individual academic challenges, faculty teaching goals and overall assessment practices were analyzed using the Teaching Goals Inventory, Angelo & Cross (1993), semi-structured interviews, a questionnaire and the Bloom taxonomy. Key findings of this study suggested that students in both instructional settings were exposed to academic challenges that were predominantly low-level in their cognitive emphasis. Additionally, data analysis revealed a limited degree of alignment between instructional goals and assessment practices. Most notably, despite the value of constructed response questions as an opportunity to develop and demonstrate high-level critical thinking skills, faculty used more low-level selected response questions, especially multiple choice than constructed-response questions. While the findings suggested discrepancies between faculty intent and assessment practices, the data revealed a wide variety of creative academic challenges at high cognitive levels that provided students with interesting and meaningful ways to develop and apply their critical thinking skills in different disciplines.