Students will rank each participant in a figure skating competition on their technical skill, style, and creativity.
The evaluation level is a goal in more advanced instruction. A good knowledge of the subject area is needed before learners can make valid judgments of quality.
Affective Domain
In the affective domain, the hierarchical aspect of learning is less clear. Also, it becomes much more difficult to prepare objectives that are observable and concrete when dealing with the values, beliefs, interests, and emotional responses of individuals. Traditional instructional designers argue that students will exhibit some behavior that is indicative of a change in attitude or boluses (for example, see Mager, 1968, or Morris and Fitz-Gibbon, 1978). This is probably true. In transformative learning theory (Mezirow, 1991), which describes changes in values, beliefs, and assumptions, learning is not considered to be transformative unless the person acts on the changes.
However, problems arise when writing objectives in this area. Say we want students to enjoy reading poetry or to develop their own code of professional values in nursing. There may very well be behaviors that indicate these goals have been reached. For example, students may read poetry in their spare time or talk to their peers about their professional values. But they also may demonstrate enjoyment in ways that we cannot observe and so validate. Or they also may do things other than the ones we have identified to indicate this kind of learning has taken place. Further, if we do state in an objective that students will read at least two books of poetry at home as an indicator of enjoyment, will students do this only because it is a expectation, not because they enjoy poetry? How are we to know that they do it at all? If they tell us, perhaps they could also, more simply, tell us that they now enjoy reading poetry more than they did before.
I deviate slightly from the instructional design literature at this point. Although we are told to avoid words such as “enjoy” and “appreciate,” I think that their use is valid. Knowledge that is
communicative in nature (to do with understanding ourselves, others, and social norms) is validated by people agreeing on what is true in a certain context of culture. Most people would agree on what “enjoy” means. Most people would probably also recognize enjoyment in progress. Some of the examples in this section will use words that are not as concrete and observable as is traditionally suggested.