This brief video (2’07”) is a reminder of the structural support that intense learning outcomes provide to the course design process. Having an understanding of the need to align course/module outcomes with programme outcomes, and to differentiate these reassessed outcomes from non-assessed topic/weekly level objectives is important. It is important because well-aligned learning outcomes provides scaffolding to all students’ learning.
These resources from 2013-2017 are being shared to support colleagues new to teaching online in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Consultancy for International Higher Education from Simon Paul Atkinson
A brief explanation (2’22”) of the central importance of designing well-structured intended learning outcomes for courses. Five domains of learning, details of which are available here: https://sijen.com/research-interests/taxonomies/ are all important in a balanced course. Structuring outcomes with an active verb, subject and context are also shared.
These resources from 2013-2017 are being shared to support colleagues new to teaching online in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Consultancy for International Higher Education from Simon Paul Atkinson
This post is a summary of the page for Stage 7 of the 8-SLDF, and the fourth element in a constructively aligned course design approach, which is feedback throughout. Closely reflective of both our assessment practice and our learning activities, feedback is best fully integrated into the learning rather than seen as a separate administrative response to submitted work. Designing feedback throughout opportunities in our courses will lead us to adopt variations in our learning activities and potentially to modify our assessment strategies too. Reviewing our strategies for feedback at this stage in the design process allows us to ensure that we can adjust our ILOs, assessment and activities if necessary to accommodate meaningful feedback throughout.
There are four concepts which we need to clarify or define, for this stage of the 8-SLDF. These are:
Formative Feedback
Feedback for learning
Feedforward
Feedback throughout.
They all feature in a well-structured feedback approach to any module or programme in higher education, regardless of whether it is a classroom/seminar based module, online or blended course. They are explored fully on the Feedback pages.
“Why do I need to worry about manual skills? I teach history/French/maths…”. My answer is simple. What tools are used in the pursuit of your discipline? Is there not a degree of increasing proficiency in the deployment of these tools expected of students they progress through their studies?
Psychomotor skills can be defined as those skills and abilities that require a physical component. Rather than using the mind to think (cognitive) or reflect (metacognitive), or our ability to speak and observe to develop social skills (affective, interpersonal), these are things we do physically. These skills require a degree of dexterity, suppleness, or strength. They require motor control.
Such skills have been in development since parents taught their children to hunt, to sew skins together and make fire. There is a rich history in vocational education towards acknowledging progressive skills development, from apprentice to journeyman and to master (Perrin, 2017), dating back before the establishment of craft guilds in the European High Middle Ages (Richardson, 2005). As the craft guilds loosened their grip, as industrialisation centralised the production of goods and ultimately services, some skills have been lost, others divided, segmented, into a series of tasks. Formal education has routinely separated cognitive and manual skills, giving primacy to intellectual skills above all others (Gardner, 2011).
With the growth of formalised vocational education, noticeably in the OECD developed economies in the 1950s to the 1970s, attention turned amongst policymakers as to how to codify and measure progressive skills development. These resulted in the development of a number of educational taxonomies for objectives (or outcomes in later language) notably those of Simpson (1972), Harrow (1972) and Dave (1969). It is understood that Ravindra Dave was party to Bloom’s project team’s original 1950s work on the cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains although all three significant contributions have to some extent referenced Bloom’s work.
Simpson (1972) established a progressive taxonomy with 7 stages.
Stage
Descriptor
Perception*
Sensory cues guide motor activity.
Set*
Mental, physical, and emotional dispositions that make one respond in a certain way to a situation.
Guided Response
First attempts at a physical skill. Trial and error coupled with practice lead to better performance.
Mechanism
The intermediate stage in learning a physical skill. Responses are habitual with a medium level of assurance and proficiency.
Complex Overt Response
Complex movements are possible with a minimum of wasted effort and a high level of assurance they will be successful.
Adaptation
Movements can be modified for special situations.
Origination
New movements can be created for special situations.
Arguably Simpson’s first two stages are dispositional and can be separated from the remaining 5 stages. Likewise, Harrow’s (1972) 6 stage taxonomy organized around the notion of coordination is less of a progressive educational taxonomy given that it combines involuntary responses*, arguably interpersonal skills** and learned capabilities:
Stage
Descriptor
Reflex movements*
Automatic reactions.
Basic fundamental movement
Simple movements that can build more complex sets of movements.
Perceptual
Environmental cues that allow one to adjust movements.
Physical activities
Things requiring endurance, strength, vigour, and agility.
Skilled movements
Activities where a level of efficiency is achieved.
Non-discursive communication **
Body language.
My personal belief is that less is more in the context of psychomotor taxonomies and favour the following 5 stage version developed by Ravindra H. Dave (1970) in the context of vocational education.
Stage
Descriptor
Imitation
Observing and copying someone else.
Manipulation
Guided via instruction to perform a skill.
Precision
Accuracy, proportion and exactness exist in the skill performance without the presence of the original source.
Articulation
Two or more skills combined, sequenced, and performed consistently.
Naturalization
Two or more skills combined, sequenced, and performed consistently and with ease. The performance is automatic with little physical or mental exertion.
I have adapted Dave’s psychomotor taxonomy in order to make it suitable for the articulation of intended learning outcomes for higher education programmes, regardless of disciplines.
Dave Stage
Atkinson’s Stage
Revised Descriptor
Imitation
(to) Imitate
ability to copy, replicate the actions of others following observations.
Manipulation
(to) Manipulate
ability to repeat or reproduce actions to prescribed standard from memory or instructions.
Precision
(to) Perfect
ability to perform actions with expertise and without interventions and the ability to demonstrate and explain actions to others.
Articulation
(to) Articulate
ability to adapt existing psychomotor skills in a non-standard way, in different contexts, using alternative tools and instruments to satisfy a need.
Naturalization
(to) Embody
ability to perform actions in an automatic, intuitive or unconscious way appropriate to the context.
I have then chosen to represent this revised version of the psychomotor domain as a circular form (as I have done with other domains). This develops the active verbs appropriate to each proto-verb for each stage which can be used to design course designers in authoring intended learning outcomes and learning activities and their objectives. The outer circle also suggest possible, but not exclusive approaches to allowing students to demonstrate such skills development in the context of higher education.
But what again of the academic who says, “I teach history (or maths, or French, or nearly any higher education discipline), what do these skills have to do with me and my students?”
My answer is simple. What tools are used in the pursuit of your discipline? Is there not a degree of increasing proficiency in the deployment of these tools expected of students they progress through their studies?
Examples of tools used in higher education across a range of disciplines are not hard to come up with. Once you start thinking about it I am sure you can add many more:
Discipline
Tools (physical, paper-based or online)
Languages
Dictionaries, Thesaurus, Lexicons
Maths
Calculator, MathML, Geometry software
History & Philosophy
Mapping software, archival retrieval, databases
Geography
GIS (Geographic Information Systems), Mapping software, Spatial databases
Psychology and biology
Response systems, lab equipment
Physics and Chemistry
Modelling and visualisation software, lab equipment
Accounting and Business
SPSS, Accounting software, Spreadsheets
Music
Instruments, recording equipment
Dance & Performance
Lighting rigs, sound equipment
More advanced students expected to record and analyse quantitative or qualitative data are likely to also be faced with using SPSS or its equivalent of NVivo or its competitors. And of course, all students should be expected to make use of the library search engines and associated bibliographic software. Most will also use word processing software (Word) and presentational software (PowerPoint).
Do we assume that the skills to use these skills are simply absorbed through some form of osmosis, through casual exposure? Can we realistically expect undergraduates to have ‘done this at school’ or for postgraduates to ‘come already equipped from their undergraduate degree’?
Obviously not. So what do we do about it as course designers and teaching faculty? Firstly we need to design our courses through a systemic approach. But we can also make use of the psychomotor taxonomies above to structure assessable intended learning outcomes. We know that students are focussed on where the assessment points to. They engage in anything that is directly assessed and ignore anything that appears peripheral. So by designing into a module’s ILOs the psychomotor skills associated with the tools of the discipline we are able to:
motivate students
encourage their real-world assessment skills
deliver employment skills
Unless there is an absolute, universally agreed, brand name associated with a tool it is always best to refer to it more generically. For example, it is better to refer to ‘GIS systems’ rather ‘ArcGIS’, or ‘professional audio mixing equipment’ rather than ‘Studiomaster ClubXS’.
Thesame guidelines on creating well-structured progressive ILOs for intellectual skills (cognitive domain) still apply.As with allILOit is important to be a precise and concise as possible while all the while trying to preserve a degree of flexibility.
Structure of all ILOs follows the same pattern: Active Verb -> Subject -> Context.
Below are some examples. Each one makes use of my taxonomy circle above demonstrating a progression in complexity should a student be required to develop increased proficiency towards mastery through an undergraduate or postgraduate degree.
This first example is from a humanities discipline in which archival databases and library-based sources more often than not require some manipulation. Consider the difference between what is being asked of a first-year undergraduate and that of a postgraduate masters student. Remember this is just one of a number of ILOs for this particular module.
Discipline: History
On successful completion of this module you will be able to:
Level 4: First Year UG
replicatesearches of valuable sources of historical research datafor the purpose of verification
Level 5: Second Year UG
employa range of different search engines and archival systemsto produce a meaningful dataset
Level 6: Third Year UG
organisea systematic search of historical recordsin order to answer a pre-determined research question
Level 7: Masters
managesearches across a range of remote web-based servicesto provide a robust dataset
You will also notice that I have not made the mistake of identifying a specific archive or database. So your resources can change without you having to rewrite your ILOs.
In this next example, from a physical science discipline, instruments are named but only using their generic name rather than a specific model or brand for the same reason. The progressive theme here is measurement.
Discipline: Physics
On successful completion of this module you will be able to:
Level 4: First Year UG
adhereto prescribed methods for using Vernier callipersto make accurate measurements
Level 5: Second Year UG
manipulatea range of micrometresto perform precise measurements
Level 6: Third Year UG
calibratean oscilloscopeto accurately measure time-variance in voltages
Level 7: Masters
integratea range of different lab equipmentin order to support the accurate recording of experimental data
Finally, here is an example from languages. I remember at one institution a student complained that they did not know how to add accents and macrons to their typed script. They were resorting to printing out a text and then providing the finishing touches with a pen! Surely we should support students to develop skills in something as superficially basic as word-processing too.
Discipline: French
On successful completion of this module you will be able to:
Level 4: First Year UG
replicate simple tasks to make use of an AZERTY keyboardto produce French language texts
Level 5: Second Year UG
employthe customisation features within your word processing softwareto facilitate authoring in French
Level 6: Third Year UG
organiseyour information technology environmentto optimise the production of edited texts in French
Level 7: Masters
integratemultilingual referenced sources in your bibliographic software and cite them appropriatelythrough a variety of publishing platforms
Hopefully, these illustrations will provide you with some insights into how you might progressively support students in their ‘tool’ use.
For most university programmes, with the exception of arts and performance related subjects, psychomotor domain skills are likely to be seen as less significant than the cognitive (intellectual skills), affective (values), metacognitive (epistemological development) and interpersonal (communication) domain skills. But I would argue there is not a single programme, if not every single module, warrants the inclusion of a psychomotor outcomes students needs to have assessed to invest value in its acquisition.
References
Dave, R. H. (1967). Psychomotor domain. Presented at the International Conference of Educational Testing, Berlin.
Gardner, H. (2011). Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
Richardson, G. (2005). Craft Guilds and Christianity in Late-Medieval England: A Rational-Choice Analysis. Rationality and Society, 17(2), 139–189. https://doi.org/10.1177/1043463105051631
This an introduction to a new resource being shared on this website, the 8-Stage Learning Design Framework, or 8-SLDF for short. The framework provides a supportive step by step process to enable faculty and course designers to develop robust and well-aligned programmes or modules. Publication of the 8-SLDF is in preparation so only brief explanations are provided but resources will be shared over time with associated commentaries. These blog posts will find a permanent home on the research pages of this site too.
I believe that the best way of ensuring that students and faculty can both engage in a meaningful, positive and fruitful learning collaboration is by designing courses well.
By well, I mean that courses that are constructively aligned, relevant to the real-world experience of students, engaging and transparent. Courses must also be cultural and socially aware. Students need to know why they are being asked to perform learning tasks and we should always have an answer. Knowing ‘why’ an activity matters because it is the first step in any individual’s self-reflective process, their metacognition and the development of their personal epistemologies (Atkisnon, 2014). We also need to know ‘why’ because doing anything for the sake of it is clearly wasteful of our time and energy. We as faculty are valuable players in the relationship between our students, the discipline, our institution and the wider world. Being good at what we do makes a difference. Designing courses that enable us to be better at what we do simply makes sense.
The 8-Stage Learning Design Framework has had a long gestation. It has its foundations built through my educational development practice around the work done by John Biggs on constructive alignment (2007) and the SOLO taxonomy (1982). I then incorporated work by Anderson and Krathwohl’s reworking of Bloom’s cognitive domain taxonomy (2001) alongside others domain development, including the original Bloom project’s articulation of the affective domain (1956), Dave’s psychomotor domain (1967), and my own interpretations of Metacognitive and Interpersonal domains.
The issue of the effective materials design was inspired by the Open and Distance learning world (pre-digital), particularly by Derek Rowntree (1994) and Fred Lockwood (1994), on my collaborations with Kevin Burden around the DiAL-e Framework (2009) and my own scholarship around the SOLE Model (2011). More recently I have drawn inspiration from the work of James Dalziel and Gráinne Conole (2016), and Diana Laurillard (2012), in their learning design conceptualisations, particularly as it relates to learning activities.
The result is I believe a comprehensive, flexible and adaptable learning design framework not just for activities but for entire courses, module and programmes. It is an appropriate framework regardless of the discipline, level, context or mode of learning. It is a framework for any adult, formal, learning context.
Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing : a revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Longman.
Atkinson, S. P. (2011). Developing faculty to integrate innovative learning in their practice with the SOLE model. In S. Ferris (Ed.), Teaching, Learning and the Net Generation: Concepts and Tools for Reaching Digital Learners. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Atkinson, S. P. (2014). Rethinking personal tutoring systems: the need to build on a foundation of epistemological beliefs. London: BPP University College.
Atkinson, S. P. (2015). Graduate Competencies, Employability and Educational Taxonomies: Critique of Intended Learning Outcomes. Practice and Evidence of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 10(2), 154–177.
Biggs, J., & Collis, K. F. (1982). Evaluating the Quality of Learning: Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome Taxonomy. New York: Academic Press Inc.
Biggs, J., & Tang, C. (2007). Teaching for Quality Learning at University: What the Student does (3rd ed.). Buckingham. GB: Open University Press.
Burden, K., & Atkinson, S. P. (2009). Personalising teaching and learning with digital resources: DiAL-e Framework case studies. In J. O’Donoghue (Ed.), Technology Supported Environment for Personalised Learning: Methods and Case Studies (pp. 91–108). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Conole, G. (2016). Theoretical underpinnings of learning design. In J. Dalziel (Ed.), Learning design: conceptualizing a framework for teaching and learning online (pp. 42–62). New York: Routledge
Dave, R. H. (1967). Psychomotor domain. Presented at the International Conference of Educational Testing, Berlin.
Krathwohl, D. R., Bloom, B. S., & Masia, B. B. (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook II: Affective Domain. New York; David McKay Company, Inc.
Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a Design Science (1 edition). New York: Routledge.
Lockwood, F. (Ed.). (1994). Materials Production in Open and Distance Learning. London: SAGE Publications Inc.
Rowntree, D. (1994). Preparing Materials for Open, Distance and Flexible Learning: An Action Guide for Teachers and Trainers. London: Routledge.
There are social conventions, unwritten rules, around feedback in a formal education setting. Most students associate feedback as coming from the voice of authority in the form of red marks on a written script! It is important to redefine feedback for university and professional learners.
In this short overview video (3’30”) Simon outlines four ‘contractual’ arrangements all faculty should establish at the outset of their course or module with respect to feedback for learning.
These are
1) ensuring that students know WHERE feedback is coming from
2) WHEN to expect feedback
3) WHAT you mean by feedback
4) WHAT to DO with the feedback when it’s received.
Feedback is undoubtedly expected from the tutor or instructor but there are numerous feedback channels available to students if only they are conscious of them. These include feedback from their peers but most important from self-assessment and learning activities designed in class.
Knowing where feedback is coming from as part of the learning process relieves the pressure on the tutor and in effect makes feedback a constant ‘loop’, knowing what to look out for and possibly having students document the feedback they receive supports their metacognitive development.
Being clear with students as to what you regard as feedback is an effective way of ensuring that students take ownership of their own learning. My own personal definition is extremely broad, from the feedback one receives in terms of follow-up comments for anything shared in an online environment to the nods and vocal agreement shared in class to things you say. These are all feedback. Knowing that also encourages participation!
Suggesting to students what they do with feedback will depend a little bit on the nature of the course and the formal assessment processes. Students naturally enough don’t do things for the sake of it so it has to be of discernable benefit to them. If there is some form of portfolio based coursework assessment you could ask for an annotated ‘diary’ on feedback received through the course. If its a course with strong professional interpersonal outcomes (like nursing or teaching for example) you might ask students to identify their favourite and least favourite piece of feedback they experienced during the course, with a commentary on how it affected their subsequent actions.
What’s important is to recognise that there are social conventions around feedback in a formal education setting, normally associated with red marks on a written script! It is important to redefine feedback for university and professional learners.
Simon Paul Atkinson (PFHEA) https://www.sijen.com
SIJEN: Consultancy for International Higher Education
I believe a sound learning design process should ensure students experience all five domains of educational objectives. Course designs that do not reflect the broad range of skills and attributes that university graduates should acquire through their studies do our students a disservice.
To support both course designers (module or programme), and those responsible for designing individual learning activities or assessments, I have created a poster that shows circular representations of all five domains. These provide a structure of progressive complexity for each educational domain taxonomy;
Low-Quality Reproduction of A1 Sized High-Quality Original
The sixth circle is an attempt to map each of these taxonomies against each other, and the SOLO taxonomy created by Professor John Biggs and reflects his work on Constructive Alignment (top right). There is also an illustration of my 8-stage learning design process (top middle) and a visualisation of the structure, common to all domains (top left).
Designers may choose to combine an activity that reflects across more than one domain and so reflects more than one intended learning outcome. Using these visual prompts should assist in this.
In January 2018 I shared on the project pages of this site a newly revised version of my ‘educational taxonomies’ poster. Now available as an A1, 150gsm, full-colour version posted in a reinforced tube anywhere in the world. See this page for costs and details.
The vast majority of employers ask that new employees, notably graduates, be effective communicators; that they should be able to work well within a team; that they take responsibility and that they are accountable for their actions. Increasingly in a global context, new employees are also expected to be culturally ‘aware’ or ‘sensitive’. A great many universities go to significant effort to promote their ‘graduate attributes’ that usually include things like ‘global citizenship‘ and ‘being an effective member of society‘.
2018 Circular Representation of the Interpersonal Domain
These abilities or attributes, communication, conflict resolution, collaboration, and cross-culture communication, all fall within the educational taxonomy of educational objectives, described as the interpersonal domain, with some overlap to an affective domain as it denotes personal value structures. The affective certainly underpins the interpersonal. Yet it is remarkable to find an institution, certainly here in the UK, in which interpersonal domain is adequately represented in their intended learning outcomes (ILO) with any notion of progression throughout a programme.
There will be elusions to ‘being able to work together in a team’ or ‘communicate effectively’ but these are rarely articulated in the form of an assessable ILO. Surely, given its importance as a personal attribute interpersonal skills should be the central feature of at least some modules within any given programme of studies. We know students pay more attention to those skills that are directly assessed so rather than having catch-all communication-lite style ILOs we should direct address and assess such attributes. My scholarship has derived an interpersonal domain taxonomy that maps the four facets of the interpersonal, communication, conflict resolution, collaboration, and cross-culture communication. Mapped within a single domain across five progressively complex levels of competence (articulate, argue, debate, translate, interpret) all four facets are represented.
As with all of my circular visual representations the boundaries between levels is fluid and can be breached by designers based on their personal needs. There may be reasons for articulating a ‘lower-level’ ILO for conflict resolution within an ‘articulate’ range whilst at the same time having an ILO addressing cross-cultural awareness from the highest ‘interpret’ level in the same module. This visual representation is intended simply to prompt discussions within learning design teams as to the appropriate language for structural ILOs and associated assessment. I also hope that it advocates for a greater balance across the domains.
A conference with the same title, held between 10-13 September 2017, at the Université du Luxembourg’s Belval Campus, Esch-sur-Alzette, was provocative, insightful and challenging. Of our contribution later, but it’s worth pointing out that of all the discipline groups it is perhaps the Humanities that increasingly struggles to justify their place in the academic pantheon. The Arts, despite unfunded, at least sees tangible products in its performance. Science delivers the ‘advances’ that our societies demand and the Social Sciences observe, comment on and pontificate over such advances. It is the Humanities that feel so out of place, with the contemporary, with the narcissistic individualism focused on ‘me right now’ and the imminent promises of tomorrow.
There is a clear need emerging from this conference to remind our societies that they depend on the cultural skills and knowledge highlighted through the humanities disciplines. They are invaluable in revealing the present and future, reflected in the past. The Humanities sense of their responsibility towards societies is sadly not requited.
The conference provided multiple tracks all serving to highlight the means by which the humanities engage with, and inform, future societal cultural endeavours. The emphasis, at times with a tinge of defensiveness, was clearly on an acknowledgement of the need to reach beyond established academic practice. Hence there were contributions from neuroscience and linguistics, from political science and social policy as well as some analysis of the curriculum disparities in the humanities disciplines.
Our contribution, that of my wife Dr Jeanette Atkinson and myself, was a presentation entitled “An Alternative Education for the Heritage Decision Makers of the Future”. The presentation documented the course development process I’ve been evolving over a decade, and first taught as a PGCert module at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences in 2011. It integrates other personal scholarship, notably around educational taxonomies and constructive alignment (S. P. Atkinson, 2013), but the process is in essence a structured professional dialogue between educational developer and academic course teams.
In this case the dialogue originated from a need, identified by Jeanette, based on her experience in researching and writing about the perspectives of heritage professionals in New Zealand (J. C. Atkinson, 2014). This work prompted a desire to inform practice in postgraduate education for future heritage professionals, focussed less on the preservation of the past, but rather on future societal impact through a popular engagement with heritage. Giving primacy of cultural values in any such education, combined with my research on higher education learning design processes, we went through the design process and originated a Masters programme. Given that the programme is currently being considered by a UK-HEI it is inappropriate to share too many details here, beyond the fact that following a sound educational learning design model, resulting in a constructively aligned curriculum, future graduates will develop not just subject knowledge but a range of contemporary and relevant intercultural skills.
The abilities, identified as being key affective and interpersonal domain learning objectives, are believed to be crucial skills for future graduates in an increasingly complex geopolitical landscape to advise and guide international policy processes well beyond the heritage sector. Flipping the process from ‘what’ to teach but to ‘why’ to teach, results in an original programme structure rich with significance. Arming students with these skills is surely one of the ‘Ends’ of the Humanities.
Atkinson, J. C. (2014). Education, Values and Ethics in International Heritage: Learning to Respect. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Group.
Atkinson, S. P. (2013). Taxonomy Circles: Visualizing the possibilities of intended learning outcomes. London: BPP University College.
Recently I have been advising colleagues on how they should write Intended Learning Outcomes across all five educational domains (cognitive, knowledge, affective, psychomotor and interpersonal) and conform to the QAA guidance (UK). This guidance (widely adopted across UK higher education a sector) breaks ILOs into:
Knowledge and Understanding
Intellectual Skills
Practical and Professional Skills
Transferable Skills.
I don’t agree with this guidance and would prefer learning designers to identify a balance of outcomes, appropriate to the nature of the discipline, the focus of the module and the modules shape or purpose within a programme. I suggest it makes more sense to do this by using five distinct domains, rather than the existing four vaguely defined categories. Pragmatically though it is possible to map five distinct domains onto the four existing catagories. This is illustrated below.
Table 1. Mapping educational domains to QAA categories
Domain
QAA Category
Description
Knowledge
Knowledge and Understanding
Knowledge often describes the scope of the subject intended to represent the ‘nature’ of the discipline with reference to the personal-epistemological and metacognitive development of students
Cognitive
Intellectual Skills
Cognitive often referred to as intellectual skills refers to ‘knowledge structures’ in cognition, the progressively complex use of knowledge artefacts
Affective
Practical and Professional Skills
Affective sometimes referred to professional ‘skills’ or attributes perception of value issues, and ranges from simple awareness (Receiving), through to the internalization of personal value systems
Psychomotor
Transferable Skills
Psychomotor referred to as practical skills refers to progressively complex manual or physical skills. This could be the ability to use a complex piece of software, instrument or paper documentation
Interpersonal
Transferable Skills
Interpersonal referred to as communication skills refers to progressively complex levels in interpersonal communication, conflict resolution, collaboration and cross-cultural communication
As stated elsewhere I think higher education fails to accurately describe the skills, attributes and knowledge that students are intended to acquire through their studies. Creating meaningful ILOs is the beginning of well designed constructively aligned curricula.
