[quoting Solomon, 28 Feb 97] It's particularly difficult when we deal with models that function best in the psychomotor domain. Some of the reason for this is that as we look at ethics, our core value is found in the old ten commandments. And, they define proper behavior in terms of "Thou shalt not's." Since I see countless examples around me of people not killing, not stealing, not committing adultery, not coveting and so on, I have a hard time recognizing a change in behavior that could have resulted from a well designed piece of instruction.
How would you know you succeeded in teaching learners to not do what they already weren't doing. Isn't it one of the basic principles that no amount of time or resources can possibly teach somebody something that they already know?
I'd take a different tack on it, Howard. I think Bloom and his colleagues did us a disfavor when they divided all learning into the cognitive, the psychomotor, and the affective (though they certainly were being consistent with the European intellectual tradition).
Elsewhere, I have supported my father's work on this issue. He has a way of viewing curriculum structures which includes a number of learning types (domains):
His point is that a full definition of a curriculum would address all of these in all disciplines, and to prove it he's written a series of six articles on some of the most improbable of the combinations.
Using this view, I would argue that the reason ID can't handle very well something like teaching ethics is that it just doesn't fit within Bloom's Taxonomy. And the ability isn't an ID/behaviorist problem, it's a problem with our culture's definition of what knowledge is, and therefore what a curriculum should be.
I have argued that fully analyzing the desired learning outcomes of any curriculum would involve writing objectives (or whatever) an every domain every time. To do less literally strips some of the humanity from the lesson. When instruction seems meaningless or irrelevant, I think it's often because some well-meaning educator has stripped it down to only its cognitive domain contents, thus literally making it inhuman. One way ID errs is because, in the hands of an insensitive practitioner, it systematically eliminates incidental instruction in the other domains by treating them as "noise." Now you know my response to those who say that instruction designed using ID is boring.
References for those who are interested, all by Foshay, Arthur W.:
(1991). The curriculum matrix: Transcendence and mathematics. Journal of Curriculum & Supervision (JCS), 6(4), 277-295.
(1995). Aesthetics and history. JCS, 10(2), 191-206.
(1996). The physical self and literature. JCS, 11(4), 341-350.
(in press). The social self and the human side of science. JCS.
(in press). The emotions and social studies. JCS.
Problem solving and the arts. (submitted to JCS).
For further information on this series, contact:
Arthur W. Foshay
awfoshay@aol.com