Instructional Objectives and Writing Performance Objectives (Week 7)

Instructional Objectives

Instructional objectives are a tool to design proper instructions, activities, and resources in order to evaluate the learning. It is a guide showing the appropriate way to the learner. Objectives part in instructional design grouped into three domains: cognitive, psychomotor, affective.

Cognitive Domain:

Cognitive category mostly related to knowledge, information and another kind of aspects of learning. In this part, Bloom’s taxonomy comes forth where the intellectual activities (cognitive objectives)  arranged from simple to advanced: Knowledge (to remember), Comprehension (to comprehend), Application (to apply), Analysis (to analyze), Synthesis (to create), and Evaluation (to evaluate).

Psychomotor Domain:

The psychomotor domain includes the skills about psychical learnings. The cognitive process helps the development of psychomotor skills such as cycling, driving etc. Heinich, Molenda, and Russel granted a taxonomy in terms of the degree of coordination: Imitation, Manipulation, Precision, and Articulation.

Affective Domain:

This area contains the objectives about learners’ psychological situations such as to feel, interest, love a certain value. We all have a psychological level related to knowledge that we acquire. It is the less used area especially in writing performance objectives. Krathwohl, Bloom and Masia presented a taxonomy which includes Receiving (give attention), Responding (will to take action), Valuing (showing a positive or a negative attitude), Organizing (to determine relationships among values), Characterizing (to accept a value as a part of one’s personality).

Writing Performance Objectives:

Writing Performance Objectives firstly orients the instruction and facilitates the design process. Writing part specifies the criteria of evaluation. It can provide a huge contribution to the motivation of the learners and ease the planned studies. To categorize the instructional objectives ensures them to be understood effectively. Categorizing also helps the instructors to know which skills have to be taught.