Thanks for invading my privacy ♥

With the mid-term assignments and examination cleared, I finally have time to blog (it has been almost a month since I last blog!).

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There are mainly three domains of learning; cognitive, affective, and psychometric. As Benjamin Bloom believes that instructors should have a goal in mind when planning a lesson, the three domains are based on the premise that the categories are ordered in degree of difficulty and that each category must be mastered before progressing to the next. Skills in the cognitive domain revolve around knowledge, comprehension, and “thinking through” a particular topic. According to Bloom, there are six major categories; knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Traditional education tends to emphasize the skills in this domain, particularly the lower-order objectives.

Somewhat less intuitive as compared to the cognitive domain is the affective domain. Skills in the affective domain describe the way people react emotionally and their ability to feel another’s pain or joy. Basically, if the teaching purpose is to change attitudes/behavior rather than to transmit/process information, then the instruction should be structured to progress through the five levels in the affective domain; receiving, responding, valuing, organizing, and characterizing.

Lastly, the psychomotor domain includes physical movement, coordination, and use of the motor-skill areas. The suggested areas for use are speech development, reading readiness, handwriting, and physical education. The education system in Switzerland tends to emphasize psychomotor development through the introduction of vocational trainings in the nation’s education curriculum. Although Bloom never did manage to create subcategories for skills in the psychomotor domain, other educators have since created seven levels in this domain; perception, set, guided responses, mechanism, complex overt responses, adaptation, and origination.

In evaluating Bloom’s taxonomy, I feel that there is limited need for the use of a taxonomy in the psychomotor domain. After all, in an industrial context, the exact skills required to perform on the job are usually identified directly from the job and task analyses. In addition, Bloom’s taxonomy presumes that logic and rationality can pursue cause and effect to the root of a problem. Yet is this necessarily true? Science has proven that there are severe and well understood limits to the chain of rationality and that the predictability of most systems in which we participate in, diverge exponentially with time, resulting in increasing unpredictability. Still, it is undeniable that Bloom’s taxonomy serves as a useful conceptual framework for the evaluation of a learner’s progress in the development of a skill.