Learning domains

Learning domains
The classification of educational objectives includes the cognitive domain, the affective domain and the psychomotor domain. Domain simply means category. Cognitive domain is intellectual capability i.e. knowledge or think. Affective domain covers feelings, emotions and behavior i.e. attitude or feel. Psychomotor domain indicates manual and physical skills i.e. skills or ‘do’. Bloom believed that education should focus on ‘mastery of subjects and the promotion of higher forms of thinking, rather than a utilitarian approach to simply transferring facts. Benjamin Bloom , a professor and educationist of the University of Chicago, demonstrated decades ago that most teaching tended to be focused on fact-transfer and information recall which is considered the lowest level of training rather than true meaningful personal development. This phenomenon remains a central challenge for educators and trainers in modern times.
The affective domain is one of four learning domains. It is important to understand what is covered by each domain to better understand how they work together to produce learning. Part of understanding the affective domain is knowing what parts of learning are included within it. The affective domain includes behaviours not covered by the cognitive, psychomotor and interpersonal domains. Namely, we are talking about values, attitudes, beliefs, feelings and emotions. The affective domain is part of a system that was published in 1965 for identifying, understanding and addressing how people learn. We naturally emphasize the cognitive domain in our teaching. After all, students think and learn with their brain. Yet the affective domain can significantly enhance, inhibit or even prevent student learning. The affective domain includes factors such as student motivation, attitudes, perceptions and values. Teachers can increase their effectiveness by considering the affective domain in planning courses, delivering lectures and activities, and assessing student learning. The cognitive domain is organized in a hierarchy that begins with the straightforward acquisition of knowledge, followed by the more sophisticated cognitive tasks of comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. The psychomotor domain relates to the learning of physical movements. The members of the original committee did not write a book on about the psychomotor domain.
The affective domain describes learning objectives that emphasize a feeling tone, an emotion, or a degree of acceptance or rejection. Affective objective vary from simple attention to selected phenomena to complex but internally consistent qualities of character and conscience. We found a large number of such objectives in the literature expressed as interests, attitudes, appreciations, values and emotional sets or biases.
We want to find teaching methods that encourage students to draw them in. Affective topics in educational literature include attitudes, motivation, communication styles, classroom management styles, learning styles, use of technology in the classroom and nonverbal communication. It is also important not to turn students off by subtle actions or communications that go straight to the affective domain and prevent students from becoming engaged.
In formal classroom teaching, the majority of the teachers’ efforts typically go into the cognitive aspects of the teaching and leaning and most of the classroom time is designed for cognitive outcomes. Similarly, evaluating cognitive learning is straightforward but assessing affective outcomes is difficult. Thus, there is significant value in realizing the potential to increase student learning by tapping into the affective domain. Similarly, students may experience affective roadblocks to learning that can neither be recognized nor solved when using a purely cognitive approach.
Psychomotor learning is the development of muscles to work in organized patterns guided by signals from the environment. It is the relationship between cognitive functions and physical movement in education. Psychomotor learning is demonstrated by physical skills such as movement, coordination, manipulation, dexterity, grace, strength, speed, actions which demonstrate the fine motor skills such as the use of precision instrument or tool or actions which evidence gross motor skills as the use of the body in dance, musical or athletic performance. Behavioral examples include driving a car, throwing a ball and playing a musical instrument.
During teaching, then we should encourage students not just to receive information at the bottom of the affective hierarchy. We’d like for them to respond to what they learn. Responding is committed in some small measure to the ideas, materials or phenomena involved by activity responding to them. Examples are: to comply with, to follow, to commend, to volunteer, to spend leisure time and to acclaim. Responding is actively participating in the information. Receiving is being aware of or sensitive to the existence of certain ideas, material or phenomena and being willing to tolerate them. Examples include: to differentiate, to accept to listen to respond to. Receiving is being open to the information, you haven’t yet made any decisions at this stage, but you’ve agreed to at least receive the information.

Md. Masum Billah
Programme Manager: BRAC Education Programme, PACE
Phone: 9355253 (res), 01714-091431(cell)
Email: mmbillah2000@yahoo.com, mmbillah@dhaka.net