Domains of thought

I think that we’ve stretched Bloom’s Taxonomy about as far as it will go.

When Bloom wrote his Taxonomy of Educational objectives, which I have to admit I have not read yet, the domain which came to dominate much of education was his work on the cognitive domain. This was seen as the “knowledge” domain, and since the purpose of education is to instil knowledge in the next generation, this was a neat bench mark from which to measure the success of education.

Most trainee teachers worth their chalk will study Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy, and most curricula and national level schemes will level year group learning goals on it. There are in fact two other domains to be considered: the affective domain and the psychomotor domain.

Affective is a bit of a vague word, but it deals with how learners react emotionally to new information. That is not to say it is like the popular stages of grief, but it deals with how students put value and meaning onto objective facts. It is the emotional domain.

It might seem like a very fluffy and useless sphere to study in terms of academics, but really it is one of the magic bullets you can use to gauge student engagement. You will often hear people talking about relevance of the topic to the student, and what relevance means is the subjective value the student places on that topic.

It, in fact, may be one of the most important domains to investigate in the information era. As mastery of facts becomes less important with rapid access databases and Google being so readily available, the ability to discern relevance and place a value hierarchy on information becomes more important. You can’t sift through the mud unless you know what gold looks like.

What is interesting to me (at least for right now), is the psychomotor domain.

This deals with actions taken in the world, and can be seen as how you use your body to investigate or make changes in the environment around you.

I get the feeling this has been largely sidelined due to academic disdain for the physical subjects. There is generally a feeling that Design Technology or Food Science are lesser disciplines compared to Physics and History, presumably because actually moving around is what workers do, not managers.

I argue that this is both a huge disservice to those subjects, and also a tremendous oversight on the part of academics. I readily accept the criticism that I have no evidence for this bias against the more active subjects, and I am only projecting my own observations on a straw man of stuffy academic types that don’t get outside enough, but I think they’re not uncommon observations.

Either way, an investigation of the psychomotor domain shows us some very cool ideas on how to grade skills. Speaking as a science teacher, I know that using a graph or conducting yourself in an experiment safely are skills which need to be taught. In the past it would be a simple tick box: can they use a Bunsen burner without setting their hair on fire? Yes. Good, education achieved.

But even a small amount of focus on that thinking reveals massive amounts of criticism. How do you know they can use it? You have one point of data. Did they do it right because they know what they’re doing, or were they just lucky? Are they going to do it again in the future? What does it mean that they can even use a Bunsen burner? Turning it on? Using it in an experiment? Knowing that they can use it to solve a problem?

Looking at the psychomotor domain shows us that such practical skills can be graded in terms of mastery.

And I would go as far to say as it can be used on mental or cognitive skills too.

We may have stretched Bloom’s taxonomy to its limit. I think we need to branch out and categorise the other domains of thought and education.