Affective Domain

When considering how individuals learn and process information, the affective domain is credited with one's value, personal, and esthetic development. The term affect originally was used when referring to emotional reactions in the absence of reason. For today's educators, it is used to discuss the integration of cognition and action. An essential element to the taxonomies of David Krathwohl, Benjamin Bloom, and Bertram Masia, the affective domain provides levels of commitment within the ascending categories: receiving, responding, valuing, organization, and characterization by value. Exposure to and participation with each category result in the ability to acknowledge and respond to phenomena, make judgments as to their worth, resolve existing conflicts, and ultimately internalize values that impact individual behavior. Taking into account a child's readiness to learn, the affective domain enhances the framework for understanding essential to language development, and assessment and evaluation, the two processes common to all learning domains. The taxonomy is organized to display levels of commitment and contains examples of observable verbs to assist in understanding its purpose and for use by teachers in designing educational objectives (see Table 1).

When applied to schools, affect refers to those aspects of education that deal with personal and social development. In its broadest sense, affect is seen as instrumental in developing self-esteem as well as one's moral or ethical nature. For this reason, commercially prepared programs that focus on character development are often used to meet the affect needs of students as well as those of society. However, in a time of increased accountability resulting from the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and mandated high-stakes testing, teaching directly to the affective domain may assist educators in closing the learning gaps presently existing among children at risk of academic failure, because this domain integrates emotion and reason. As early as 1984, George Mandler referred to the implications of psychological research, which demonstrated that in the presence of stimuli, thought and feeling occur simultaneously in human experience.

For today's educators, integrating social-emotional learning with required content has the potential of strengthening understanding as well as organizing student action in a positive and goal-directed manner. It recognizes that cognitive growth is dependent on the development of social and emotional understanding. Jonathan Cohen reminds us that children cannot just input academic knowledge, but rather grow along a number of developmental pathways of which the affect is only one. Because these pathways are so interconnected, underdevelopment in one inhibits growth in all others; however, expanded growth in any one can also lead to the further growth of others. Developing the whole child, which includes not only the cognitive domain but the affective domain as well, only makes sense in the global world in which we live.

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