Educational goals in a professional master degree in Public Health: assessment according Bloom’s Taxonomy

Abstract

The professional master programs are an instrument of a more comprehensive policy intended to make graduate studies in Brazil more flexible. As such, they have the purpose of bringing academia closer to the world of labor in general. In order to do so, they need to break the barriers between these two worlds and one of the strategies focuses on didactic practice, which is closely related to and guided by educational objectives. Since the lack of clarity concerning objectives is a common cause of failure in the classroom teaching, this study sought to evaluate the educational objectives of a professional master’s degree in Public Health provided by a Brazilian federal university. For the proposed study, we used the documentary analysis an theoretical framework was Bloom´s Taxonomy principles. We concluded that the case in question needs to improve the definition of its educational objectives, in order to allow a better targeting of its pedagogical practices, to contribute to effectively bring teaching and service closer in the field of Public Health. Without that, it will tend to reproduce the ideological perspective of academic master programs, in which the social applicability of the knowledge produced, despite its scientific relevance, is contingent to and conditioned by the individual capacity of and not by its definition as an indicator of results of the program.

Health Education; Professional master’s degree; Evaluation of educational objectives