Tag: educational taxonomies

Designing with all 5 Educational Domains

[See Courses on Using Educational Taxonomies]

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
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.

 

Defining Transferable Skills in Education

[See Courses for Educational Taxonomies]

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.

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