Affective Domain
Education and Human Service programs are all pretty “high touch”.
Þ Teachers teach.
Þ Administrators administrate.
Þ Social workers advise.
Þ Human service professionals run programs.
You get the picture.
What they all have in common is that they all deal with PEOPLE. Often in sensitive arenas. So those who complete our programs have to treat others with respect and fairness, accept diversity, guard confidentiality and maintain integrity. In other words, they must be PROFESSIONAL.
So CEHS programs must figure out how to teach these things and develop outcomes to measure them.
Similar to Bloom’s Taxonomy, used to identify learning outcomes, we have Krathwohl to guide us in the Affective (attitudes, beliefs and values) arena.
At the college level, the lower order affective outcomes of receiving and responding to information are considered necessary but certainly not sufficient. At UIS, we are VERY interested in learning at the valuing and organization levels. Thoroughly incorporating these values if, of course, the ultimate goal, but that usually requires life experience, not usually achieved until later in professional practice.
Here are some examples of the higher-level affective outcomes you might find at CEHS:
One thing that is immediately apparent with all of these examples is that thought and reflection is required. And these questions cannot be answered with a simple yes or no, making it sometimes challenging to document and measure attitudes, beliefs and dispositions but we do!
Working in the affective domain raises the issue of critical thinking skills. We will look at these next time.
The Data Wizard