Adapting Bloom’s Taxonomy to Trace the Evolution of Assessment Patterns in Honors Organic Chemistry

This study explores changes in assessment patterns in honors organic chemistry exams at the University of Cape Town. By adapting Bloom’s taxonomy, we developed a detailed workflow for coding exam questions in order to map cognitive distributions and reveal patterns in assessment focus over a 10-year period. Our findings show significant shifts in the balance of exam questions over the 2014–2024 period. Where the exams in 2014 and 2015 tended toward a blend of simpler Remember and Understand questions with more complex Create-type questions, in subsequent years there was a noticeable shift toward questions of intermediate complexity with a simultaneous reduction in the simpler recall questions. Interestingly, despite the changes in the distributions of the various question types, the 2024 exam was found to contain comparable higher-order content compared to the 2014 exam. In this way, both qualitative and quantitative inductive analysis offers a comprehensive perspective on assessment adaptations that can be used for reflective review of assessment practices.