Assessing Affective Domain

Most educators focus on the cognitive domain, but, what about the affective domain? I'm including a text, a website, and a video that will guide us to the assessmnet of this important facet of learning.

SLOs, Bloom’s Taxonomy, Cognitive, Psychomotor,
and Affective Domains.
Benjamin Bloom (1948) developed classifications of intellectual behavior and
learning in order to identify and measure progressively sophisticated learning.
College faculty are hired because of their discipline expertise and are sometimes
unfamiliar with important pedagogical theories that contribute to effective
learning. Bloom's taxonomy is especially important in higher education where
outcomes need to address the student ability to use information, not just recall and
regurgitate concepts. Lower levels of learning are easier to assess but do not
adequately display what the student can DO with the knowledge. Refer to the next
page for a diagram of Bloom's increasing levels of complex learning.
However, learning is not a purely cognitive function; learning occurs differently
when it entails performing a skill or re-evaluating behavior. Three domains of
learning are recognized
:
• Cognitive domain defining knowledge classification. See the
following page for a table describing increasing complexity in
cognitive learning. Each level has examples of verbs that could be
used in writing an SLO at this level. These verbs are not magic or
mandatory, our faculty found them helpful, so we used a variety of
models and created our own.
• Psychomotor domain (Gronlund, 1970; Harrow, 1972; Simpson,
1972) defining physical skills or tasks classification. Check out the
psychomotor table on the following page.
• Affective domain (Krathwhol, Bloom, and Masia, 1964) defining
behaviors that correspond to attitudes and values. Please refer to the
affective table. Affective outcomes tend to be the hardest to articulate
initially and often appear difficult to assess at first glance. However,
cognitive outcomes often represent the outcomes most closely related
to deeper thinking and life-long learning, as well as the outcomes we
value most.
NOTE: Student learning outcomes should address relevant outcomes for
each of these domains but must be appropriate to the course.
Think about possible means of assessing the outcomes. The essence of
student learning outcomes lies in focusing on the results you want from your
course rather than on what you will cover in the course.  Ask yourself how
you will know when you have accomplished those outcomes

http://www.assessment.uconn.edu/primer/taxonomies1.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__YdXxwBZ7Q