TAXONOMIES OF LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Simply writing learning objectives “off the top of your head” can be frustrating because a seemingly endless number of possible objectives exist. Further, you are likely to write first those objectives that have a very narrow focus, specify content topics, and represent lower level cognitive skills. A taxonomy can help you bring to mind the wide range of important learning objectives and thinking skills.
Taxonomies of instructional learning objectives are highly organized schemes for classifying learning objectives into various levels of complexity. Generally, educational learning objectives fall into one of three domains, although a complex performance may involve more than one of them.
1 . Cognitive domain: Objectives focus on knowledge and abilities requiring memory, thinking, and reasoning processes.
2. Affective domain: Objectives focus on feelings, interests, attitudes, dispositions, and emotional states.
3. Psychomotor domain: Objectives focus on motor skills and perceptual processes.
Learning objectives within each domain may be classified by using a taxonomy for that domain. Because there is more than one way to define a classification scheme, several different taxonomies have been developed for sorting learning objectives in a given domain. Only two of these taxonomies for the cognitive domain are described here. Other cognitive domain taxonomies are summarized in Appendix D . Chapter 6 will discuss using taxonomies to develop an assessment plan. The other chapters in Part II discuss creating tasks to assess learning objectives at different taxonomy levels.