Abstract:

The research of educational objectives is the core topic of basic education, such problems as behaviorism inclination and levels for itself existed in cognitive taxonomy. The main purpose of the project is to promote all students’ mathematics achievements and cognitive abilities. Based on Bloom’s Taxonomy (Bloom, 1965) and its modified version specifically developed for mathematics (Wilson, 1971), it developed a framework for the assessments of students’ mathematics cognitive abilities through a large range survey at Qingpu district of Shanghai. This paper will introduce the main process of the survey which aims to extract the implicit main factor by factor analysis method, reveal the disadvantage of original objectives taxonomy, and construct a framework of “equal distance” four-level taxonomy. According the above framework, two large scale Mathematical Cognition Tests had been conducted on grade eight students in Shanghai. The results showed that, on the first three cognition levels (Procedure Level, Conceptual Level and Comprehensive Level), students’ performance today were much better than 17 years before. But on the topmost level (Explorative Level), students’ performance has no any improvements 17 years later. This paper will also do some other preliminary analysis, such as regional differences between city and town, sexual differences between boys and girls, perspective styles of different students. Otherwise, based on the results of this research, it is now carrying out a serial experimental researches to improve Chinese students’ higher level mathematics abilities.

Keywords:

Bloom’s Taxonomy, Factor analysis, Higher level mathematics ability, Educational objectives.