For nearly 20 years learning outcomes have been touted as the most critical aspect of educational effectiveness (NCHEMS, 2000). Advances in educational assessment and evaluation techniques have made it possible to measure everything that might be counted. Cognitive achievements are categorized and converted into countable groups. Assessment is now a profession. Writing learning outcomes has almost become a science unto itself. However, education may have become obsessed with teaching to cognitive outcomes to the detriment of affectivei outcomes. An Internet search will yield numerous rubrics for measuring cognitive outcomes; relatively few (if any) are available for measuring affective learning outcomes. A cursory glance at a major professional organization’s website provides a snapshotii. Spady (1994, p.2) was explicit that learning outcomes did not equate to personal “values, beliefs, attitudes, or psychological states of mind”. An equal focus on learning outcomes for the affective domainiii may be in order. Krathwohl, Bloom, and Masia (1964) constructed the affective domain as
Objectives which emphasize a feeling tone, an emotion, or a degree of acceptance or rejection. Affective objectives vary from simple attention to selected phenomena to complex but internally consistent qualities of character and conscience…objectives in the literature expressed as interests, attitudes, appreciations, values, and emotional sets of biases. (p. 7)
i For an extensive understanding of learning in the affective domain, see Krathwohl, D.R., Bloom, B.S. and Masia, B. B. (1964). Taxonomy of educational objectives, Book II. Affective domain. New York, NY. David McKay Company, Inc.
ii The National Institute of Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) maintains a resource website Student learning statement outcome resourceswhich has 17 external links. Each of those are conceivably linked to an organization that NILOA believes is good at constructing learning outcome statements. Of the links that worked on 5/27/2019, 100% referenced Bloom’s Taxonomy and cognitive learning objectives. There were zero explicit statements for affective domain learning outcomes.
iii All learning outcomes are generally constructed with learning taxonomies as guidelines. This research discussion refers to those sorts of notions as defined by Anderson, L., & Krathwohl, D. A. (2001). Taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York, NY: Longman.
Despite numerous calls to action over decades of research, education remains laser-focused on cognitive learning outcomes. When affective learning is mentioned in literature, researchers generally have—lumped all five levels together or—only evaluated the second and third levels of the affective domain (McCroskey, 1994; Messman & Jones-Corley, 2001). When affective domain measures are utilized, they are generally masked as cognitive self-report measures by students that represent affect for the course or the instructor (Bowman, 2010, Hooker & Denker, 2014; Witt, Wheeless, & Allen, 2004). Rather than reflecting how much the students enjoy the subject-matter, or enjoy the instructors, affective learning goals should represent internalized values that mitigate behavior over extended periods of time. Affective learning should linger well past the initial learning activity. The term “data” is, after all, the plural of datum; education policy-writers seem to have become transfixed on individual data points as measures of learning. To (begin to) adequately measure affective learning, pre-tests (during the first day of any term-based courses) and post-tests (during the final week of the term) are appropriate. Measurements of a higher-order (affective domain) construct also requires the use of second-order confirmatory factor analysis (Brown, 2015).
Emotion researchi has long recognized that behavior stems from attitudes, which in term stem from valuesii. Research focusing on what happens between values-adoption and attitude-formation have settled on the most powerful emotions, in terms of the consequences that each emotion may have on an individual’s productivityiii. While the top five emotions may (and do) change positions over decades of research, there is nearly consensus that no more than six to nine emotions are powerful enough at dictating attitude formation (and resulting behavior) for extended periods of time; facial response recognition research corroborates the understandingiv. A clear dichotomy of positive and negative emotions emerges. Over longer periods of time, repeated exposure to conditions that elicit these emotions have lasting and significant effects on attitude formation and may dictate behavior. Among the positive emotions, derivatives of joy and satisfaction have the greatest impact on behavior. The two emotions which are the most detrimental to behavior are offshoots of fear and anxiety. The recent focus on grit, resilience, and persistence illuminate the potential for focus on the affective learning domain (Duckworth & Gross, 2014, Shechtman, DeBarger, Dornsife, Rosier, & Yarnall, 2013). Pekrun & Linnenbrink-Garcia (2014) advocated further research that has potential to achieve a deeper understanding of how emotions play roles in classroom settings thereby influencing learning and behavior. Immordino-Yang and Damasio (2007 suggested that emotions are attached to learning in the classroom and become part of how the acquired information is retrieved thereafter.
i For an excellent summation see Izard, C. E. (2007). Basic emotions, natural kinds, emotion schemas, and a new paradigm. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(3), 260-280.
ii A rich discussion may be found in Izard, C. E. (2010). The many meanings/aspects of emotion: Definitions, functions, activation, and regulation. Emotion Review, 2(4), 363-370.
iii For a classic review, see Ortony, A., Turner, T. J. (1990). What’s basic about basic emotions? Psychological Review, 97, 315-331
iv Emergent paradigms and theoretical concepts are illustrated in Jack, R. E., Garrod, O. G., and Schyns, P. G. (2014). Dynamic facial expressions of emotion transmit an evolving hierarchy of signals over time. Current Biology, 24, 187–192. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.11.064
Piaget observed, “at no level, at no state, even in the adult, can we find a behaviour or a state which is purely cognitive without affect nor a purely affective state without a cognitive element involved” (as cited in Clark & Fiske, 1982, p.130). Senge (1990) described creative tension as the energy that grants agency to an individual or a learning organization to close the gap between vision and reality. To paraphrase his example, a box of limp rubber-bands is not doing much; an individual rubber-band must be stretched to become effective. When we see the state of higher education today, particularly the reticence to hold administrators, coaches, faculty, staff, and students accountable, we are witnessing the consequences of a decades-long practice of ignoring the affective domain. Hannah Arendt termed this the banality of evil.
Valueless students become valueless leaders. We’ve come full circle; will we break the cycle or simply spiral downward?
REFERENCES
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