Evaluating Student Learning in an IT Curriculum Using Bloom's - Webb's Curriculum Taxonomy

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) requires any accredited undergraduate Information Technology (IT) program to develop a continuous improvement practice to evaluate and update the undergraduate IT curriculum as necessary. During the process to incorporate cybersecurity topics into the IT curriculum, the faculty at a southeastern public university developed an IT Security-related and Cybersecurity Curriculum Taxonomy to identify strategies to move security-related topics taught in the higher level courses to lower and intermediate courses. To do this, the faculty combined Bloom's Taxonomy's six levels of thinking with Webb's Depth of Knowledge Model to create Bloom's - Webb's Curriculum Taxonomy. The purpose of this paper is to describe the methodology used to create the taxonomy with the expectation that the same method could be used to evaluate any IT curriculum for a variety of reasons.