Week 6 - Domains of Learning

This lecture taught me the various domains of learning - Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor...

Cognitive domain:
The cognitive domain refers to the manipulation of the learner by the teacher. The authoratative figure shapes his protege/student/child in whatever way he deems is correct. A youth football coach for example, plans his training methods in a way whereby it would mould the young footballer into the best player in the world in future. How much the young kid learns depends on all the various methods used by the coach.

Famous footballers and basketballers, such as players like David Beckham or Michael Jordan, have all attributed their success to proper coaching since young.

I beleive this cognitive domain of learning is extremely impotant especially when applying it to the younger generaion. As we all know, a lot of kids learn cognitively when they are young. i.e. We learn how to sing in a choir because of the training we receive during choir practices, or we lern how to act because of drama lessons.

How much a person learns, hugely depends on how well the authoratative figure (in this case, the coach or instructor) structures his lessons...



Affective domain:
The learner can make his own choices to pick what he wishes to learn and what he doesn't want to learn. In some way, this way seems to be the case in most of education systems here. I can attend a lecture, the lecturer can put in 110% effort into planning the lesson and teaching me, but whatever i learn depends on how much effort i put in into listening, and revising, and learning.

I personally teach in a choir during the periods of time when i am not studying in NUS. And what i have noticed is that this affective domain of learning can be applied and is very common amongst the students in my school. I devised lesson plans, played them youtube videos, structured games and activities, in a bid for them to learn their notes and learn the proper ways of singing.

Yet, i still find my progress and effectiveness of lessons depending very much on the students themselves. On days when they actually put in effort and time to learn, they learn very quickly. But on other days when they choose to 'switch off', my lessons become rather useless.

One blur area i see here would be how it overlaps with my football example above in the cognitive domain. Because, how much the young player learns also depends on how much he practices. The coach can only do so much for him, and the rest is up to him.

Psychomotor domain:

This refers to learning via observation. In psychomotor learning research, attention is given to the learning of coordinated activity involving the arms, hands, fingers, and feet, while verbal processes are not emphasized.

I developed an interest in music and singing after observing family members singing and dancing to music when i was younger. Subsequently, i was introduced to piano and i never looked back since then. The coordination of my right and left hands and my feet for the pedal can somewhat be seen like a psychomotor learning process... or can it?

the other example i can think of would be rollerblading, or cycling...