Abstract

This work is a pilot study on the learning outcomes of students, who were taught a research course for seven weeks, using didactic and Socratic instruction methods. The course was taught in two sessions concurrently. The students were divided into two groups (A and B) and both groups were taught either with Socratic instruction method or didactic instruction method. At the end of the 7 weeks, the students were tested. The test, which was valid and reliable, was categorized into 5 domains of Bloom’s taxonomy: analysis, comprehension, evaluation, knowledge and synthesis. Based on the results, there was no evidence to show if there is a difference in the learning outcomes of groups A and B. There was an outlier in the synthesis domain. Interpretation of students’ projects and final papers shows a difference in the degree of creativity. This is however tangential to the main research question.

Key words: Didactic method, Socratic method, Bloom’s taxonomy, pilot method.