Bloom’s Taxonomy in Teacher’s Pedagogy of Religious Education During Teaching Practice in Kenyan Secondary Schools

Abstract

The research from which this paper is derived examined levels of Bloom’s taxonomy displayed by secondary school students during their Religious Education lessons by teachers on teaching practice.  Sixty teachers on their teaching practice for three months were observed as they presented their Religious Education lessons to these students. The key objectives of this investigation were: to: establish students’ levels of the taxonomy displayed; examine the methods and instructional resources the teacher used to address these levels of the taxonomy; determine the level of students’ participation as they manifested different levels of the taxonomy and finally explore how the students’ performance was related to the student’s levels of the taxonomy. Data was collected through the use of an adapted teaching practice standardised observation schedule of the University of Nairobi.  Each of the sixty students was observed six times by the researcher and two research assistants were trained on what to focus on during their observations.   A documentary analysis schedule was used to access the students’ schemes of work and lesson plans to identify the various taxonomy levels students were expected to achieve.  By applying content analysis, guided by themes arising from the objectives, to the records of observation and summaries from the documents accessed, a thick description was written.  Using descriptive statistics, the various levels of the taxonomy were tied to the teachers’ performance of their teaching practice exercise.     The findings emerging showed that the most popular levels were at remembering, understanding and applying and the teachers’ performance was lower than that of the teachers whose students had analysis, evaluation and synthesis skills.  This could be explained by the fact that students’ levels of the taxonomy tended to depend on the number of teacher’s levels of engagement with the taxonomy in the student’s learning process.  This led to the conclusion that students become what their teachers are.  The study recommends revisiting the teacher’s training pedagogy to be geared more towards enhancement and promotion of analysis, evaluation and creating skills of the taxonomy.

Keywords: pedagogy, planning, taxonomy level, learning, teaching

DOI: 10.7176/JEP/12-10-08

Publication date: April 30^th 2021