Affective Domain of Educational Objectives

In the past, people were not very happy about emotionalism in education. They argue that intellectualism had little or nothing to do with the learner’s interests, emotions or impulses.

Today, people have recognized that the learner’s feelings and emotions are important considerations in education. This is why a group of interests led by Tanner and Tanner (1975) insist that the primary goals of learning are affective. They are of the opinion that learners should not learn what is selected for them by others. This is because it amounts to imposition on the learners of other peoples values and purposes. This of course defines learners’ own feelings and emotions. You can see that this argument is in contrast to what happens in our schools today where most schools hold that fundamental objectives are cognitive.

As a matter of fact, what we have in our school systems is the discipline-centred curriculum projects which focus on the cognitive learning to the neglect of affective processes. Although the primary goal of a good teacher is to help students learn, not to make them feel good yet it is an important role of a good teacher to make students feel good about their efforts to learn and their success in learning.

This will help to create a balance and interdependence between the cognitive and the affective processes of learning. In the last unit we shall be concerned with the affective domain and its characteristics. Before we do that, let us look at what you will achieve at the end of the unit.

Characteristic Features of Affective Domain

While you were reading the information in this unit, you learnt that affective domain has to do with feelings and emotions. These are the emphatic characteristic of this domain of acceptance or rejection. It is concerned with interests, attitudes, appreciation, emotional biases and values. The function of the affective domain in the instructional situation pertains to emotions, the passions, the dispositions, the moral and the aesthetic sensibilities, the capacity for feeling, concern, attachment or detachment, sympathy, empathy, and appreciation.

Can you now see that your feeling, emotion, appreciation, the value you place on this course, together form your affective disposition of the course. It shows your personal-social adjustment in this course and indeed in the programme. Basically you, as a learner, have internalized and appreciated /what you have been taught or what you have learnt are demonstrated in attitudes, likes and dislikes etc. Affective domain is generally covert in behaviour. The educational objectives here vary from simple attention to complex and internally consistent qualities of character and conscience.

Examples of learning outcomes in the affective domain are:

• The learner will be able to appreciate the use of frawing instruments in the construction of objects in Technical drawing.
• The learner will be able to show awareness of the rules and regulations in a technical workshop to prevent accidents.
• The learner should be able to show his likeness for neatness and accuracy in the use of measurement instruments etc.

Affective domain has five hierarchical categories. You remember that the cognitive domain has six hierarchical levels.

Specifically, the levels in affective domain fall into these levels: receiving, responding, valuing, organization and characterization

Receiving

This is the lowest level of the learning outcomes in the affective domain. It means attending. It is the learner’s willingness to attend to a particular stimulus or his being sensitive to the existence of a given problem, event, condition or situation. It has three sub-levels.

These are:

1. Awareness: which involves the conscious recognition of the existence of some problems, conditions, situations, events, phenomena etc. take for instance as a teacher, you come into your class while the students are making noise. You will notice that the atmosphere will change. This is because the students have become aware of your presence. They are merely aware.
2. Willingness: This is the next stage which involves the ability to acknowledge the object, event, problem instead of ignoring or avoiding it. The students in your class kept quite because they noticed and acknowledged your presence. If they had ignored your presence they would continue to make noise in the class.
3. Controlled or selected attention: This involves the learner selecting or choosing to pay attention to the situation, problem, event or phenomenon. When you teach in the class, the learner is aware of your saying or the points you are making. In that case he will deliberately shut off messages or speeches or sounds as noises. Receiving in a classroom situation involves getting, holding and directing the attention of the learners to whatever the teacher has to say in the class.

Responding

In this case the learner responds to the event by participating. He does not only attend, he also reacts by doing something. If in your class you set a test for your students, first the students become aware of the test, they are willing to take the test, they now select to do it and they react by doing it. Responding has three sub-levels too. These are:

1. acquiescence in responding: which involves simple obedience or compliance.
2. Willingness to respond: This involves voluntary responses to a given situation.
3. Satisfaction in response: if he is satisfied with the response he enjoys reacting to the type of situation.

If in the school situation you give a project to your class, they comply by doing the project very well. They are satisfied with what they have been able to produce. They will be happy and would wish to have that type of project again and again. That shows that their interest is now awakened.