The Future of Education

The study was aimed to explore the seventh graders’ self-confidences in answering questions of different assessment classification. Taiwanese fifteen-year-old students usually performed well in the PISA science tests. It was interesting to find out whether student self-confidence performed well as same as science achievement or not. The instrument was created by the researchers according to the revised Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives in the cognitive processes. The assessment of the human digestive and circulatory systems was formed sixteen different item categories integrating with four knowledge domains, and four revised Bloom’s cognitive processes to construct a questionnaire of the student answering self-confidence. There were five hundred and twenty seventh graders from the southern area of Taiwan participated in the study. Students’ self-confidences in answering questions that were compiled by the same cognitive process domain but different categories of the knowledge domains were analyzed with statistical methods. The results indicated there was a significant difference found between the gender and student learning outcome; the female students performed significantly better than the male students. A significant difference was found between students’ learning outcome and their self-confidences in answering the entire test. Students’ answering correct rate from the highest to the lowest was listed as the knowledge domains of conceptual, factual, procedural, and meta-cognitive knowledge. Students’ answering correct rate in the cognitive process dimension from the highest to the lowest were listed as the dimensions of remember, application, higher-order thinking, and understanding. The higher achievement groups performed the highest self-confidence in answering questions, but there was no significant difference between the medium and lower achievement groups. According to the findings, it is recommended that science teachers apply the test item categories to design the assessments since it will be helpful for the teachers to realize the students’ conceptual understandings, push the students toward higher-order thinking, and increase their meta-cognitive thinking skills and self-confidence in science learning.

Keywords: assessment classification, self-confidence, revised Bloom’s taxonomy, knowledge domains, cognitive process;

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