Since its introduction in 1956, Bloom’s taxonomy has become widely applied in educational settings. Many teachers first encounter the three domains, affective, cognitive and psychomotor, while taking their initial teaching courses in college. Here they learn to apply the different concepts to create challenging and holistic activities and assessments.
Once in the classroom, however, teachers tend to focus on the simplest behaviors from each of the domains. The increasing emphasis on adding more rigorous material to lessons has teachers searching for ways to include more complex and emotionally challenging material. Revisiting the components of the affective domain in Bloom’s taxonomy can assist teachers in creating emotionally challenging lessons by asking questions from the more rigorous categories.
Categories from the Affective Domain
There are five categories in the affective domain. It starts with the most basic or simplest of emotional behavior and increases in complexity of emotional responses. The five categories are:
- Receiving Phenomena: listening skills and awareness of stimuli and environment
- Responding to Phenomena: active participation, asks own questions and can demonstrate rules or facts
- Valuing: internalizes a set of values and either accepts or commits to them
- Organization: assigns priorities to values and can compare, contrast and relate those values
- Internalizing: has a value system or belief that controls behavior
Questions that Help Develop Rigorous Lessons
The first two categories in the affective domain, receiving and responding to phenomena, are not rigorous. They are concerned with the students’ ability to learn basic information and demonstrate understanding of new material. Rigor requires students to be more interactive with the material.
Valuing, organization and internalizing all are formed by questions that contain rigorous qualities. The following questions are an example of how these three categories can help develop a rigorous lesson or activity:
- Can students justify their position on a controversial topic?
- Does the lesson allow for students to propose a plan for improvement and show commitment to this by following through with the project?
- Do students recognize the need for a balance between freedom and responsible behavior?
- Can students develop a plan to solve a controversial problem?
- Are students able to hold themselves responsible for independent and team work?
- Are students challenged to uphold ethical behaviors?
- Are students challenged to revise their judgment or change their emotionally driven behaviors when confronted with new information?
Using questions developed from the affective domain of Bloom’s taxonomy is a step towards exposing students to more rigor, but challenging emotional lessons are not the only part of rigor. Students also need to interact with material that challenges their knowledge and encourages them to think critically about situations.
Reference: Bloom, B.S. and Krathwohl, D.R. Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals. New York, Longmans, Green, 1956.
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