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Abstract
Background. Judging instructional alignment among learning objectives, practice tasks, and assessments requires attention to substantive task demands, and surface action-verb frequencies alone are not enough.
Objective. To evaluate instructional alignment across the written curriculum of MIT OpenCourseWare 3.091SC (Introduction to Solid-State Chemistry) with the two-dimensional Revised Bloom's Taxonomy.
Methods. A rubric-based documentary curriculum analysis covered 35 sessions, nine modules, 176 explicit learning objectives, and 62 task documents (213 pages). The documents held 260 parent problems and 494 labeled task units, from which five within-type duplicates, 25 figure-restricted units, and seven context-insufficient units were excluded, leaving 457 unique codable task units, including 345 primary tasks (253 homework, 33 quiz, and 59 module examination units), alongside 175 codable objectives. Taxonomic distributions were evaluated with 24-cell overlap, 5,000 module-cluster bootstrap resamples, leave-one-module-out jackknife bounds, and six sensitivity specifications.
Results. Learning objectives emphasized C2 Understand (95/175, 54.3%) and Conceptual knowledge (101/175, 57.7%), whereas primary tasks emphasized C3 Apply (237/345, 68.7%) and Procedural knowledge (250/345, 72.5%). Aggregating C1–C3 covered 330/345 primary tasks (95.7%), yet C1–C2 made up only 93/345 (27.0%). Mean module-level 24-cell overlap was 0.620 (95% bootstrap CI: 0.490–0.743) for objectives with practice and 0.595 (0.498–0.690) for objectives with assessments. The mean C3 difference between assessments and practice was +0.6 percentage points (95% CI: −10.6 to +13.0).
Conclusion. Written tasks operationalize conceptual objectives mainly through quantitative and representational C3 application. No systematic C3 escalation from homework to examinations was found. Dual-rater calibration is a planned next step.
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