How can OR/MS Educators Benefit From Creating and Using Taxonomies?

After listing various approaches used over the years to teach OR/MS and quantitative methods and showing sample references for each, this paper suggests that taxonomies, combined with any other approach, can uniquely serve an important educational objective – showing the overall picture of the subject matter. The paper argues for using taxonomies in basic courses and in graduate education as they provide a framework in which the material to be taught, reviewed, or researched can be organized. When made explicit, the framework helps students organize knowledge gained in their own minds. Productivity Analysis (PA) is used to illustrate a taxonomy's educational potential. Lastly, for those interested in so enhancing their approach to teaching, a bibliography of publicly available taxonomies for various theoretic and applied OR/MS sub-disciplines is provided.