The Impact of Different Levels of Cognitive Questions in Examination Papers on the Final Grades of First-year Electrical Engineering Students.

Examination papers are used around the globe as assessments for learning, as learning and of learning. Many academics seek to maintain a balance between lower order and higher order cognitive questions in these papers, seeking to help students transform their knowledge from quantitative to qualitative in nature. Some achieve this by using different illustrative verbs from the six levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. The purpose of this research is to investigate the degree to which different levels of questions in a summative examination predict the final grade of two types of students in a compulsory electrical engineering module. These two groups are termed ECP students (students who undertake an additional year of study prior to enrolling in a mainstream programme) and ]VISP students (students who enroll for a mainstream programme directly after completing their high-school career). Stepwise regression was used to analyze the data (n = 64 for the ECP group and n = 487 for the MSP group from 2016 and 2017) to find a set of independent variables (individual questions in the summative examination) that significantly influence the dependent variable (final grade of the summative examination). Results indicate that, on average, three out of six questions contributed the most to the final grades of the ECP students while all six questions were found to contribute for MSP students. A key deficiency in ECP students was noted regarding applied mathematics required in the analysis and design of electrical circuits. A possible recommendation is to expose ECP students to more physical science questions that require several different equations during their additional year of study to better help them demonstrate important higher-order cognitive skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]