A Taxonomic Description of the Science Integrating Learning Objectives in Career and Technical Education Programs of Study

The integration of career and technical education (CTE) and academic curricular content that capitalizes on natural and inherent connections represents a challenge for CTE professionals. The purpose of this study was to employ Bloom's revised taxonomy (Anderson, Krathwohl, Airasian, Cruiskshank, Mayer, Pintrich, Raths, & Wittrock, 2001) to describe the learning objectives CTE programs operationalized in order to integrate science concepts into classroom and laboratory instructions. The findings illustrate that while 66% of the participating CTE programs were integrating CTE and science curricular content, 88% of the specific integrating learning objectives utilized were characterized as addressing only lower order cognitive processes. It was found that higher order CTE and science integrating learning objectives that addressed procedures or techniques were virtually nonexistent and none of the objectives reviewed addressed metacognitive knowledge. Overall, the findings indicate that the integrating learning objectives that were reviewed tended to be concrete, simple, and have prescribed outcomes.