LEARNING DOMAINS

In 1956, educational psychologist Dr. Benjamin Bloom created a system to classify learning
objectives into a series of learning domains that encourage teachers to think holistically about
education. His system came to be known as Bloom’s Taxonomy. Much has been written about it, and
it has been widely applied, including here at Davenport.
Bloom identified three domains, or categories, of educational activities:

 Cognitive Knowledge or Mental Skills

 Affective Attitude or Emotions
 Psychomotor Skills or Physical Skills

When these learning domain ideas are applied to learning environments, active verbs are used to
describe the kind of knowledge and intellectual engagement we want our students to demonstrate.

COGNITIVE KNOWLEDGE
The Cognitive Domain develops six areas of intellectual skills that build sequentially from simple to
complex behaviors.
Bloom arranged them this way:

 Knowledge (recall of information)

 Comprehension (understanding of meaning)
 Application (use of concept)
 Analysis (deconstruction of concept)
 Synthesis (combination of information to create meaning)
 Evaluation (judgment of concept)

In time, this arrangement evolved into what we now call Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy. Category
names were changed from nouns to verbs, but are still ordered from simple to complex:

 Remembering
 Understanding
 Applying
 Analyzing
 Evaluating
 Creating

AFFECTIVE ATTITUDE
The Affective Domain includes five areas of emotional response, categorized as simple to complex
ways of processing feelings and attitude. Bloom arranged them this way:

 Receiving (passively paying attention)

 Responding (actively learning and reacting)
  Valuing (attaching worth to information)
 Organizing (arranging and elaborating on information)
 Characterizing (valuing belief that influences behavior)

PSYCHOMOTOR SKILLS
The Psychomotor Domain, which focuses on physical skills, was identified, but not defined, by Dr.
Bloom. His original ideas were expanded by 1970s educators, including Dr. Elizabeth Simpson, who
developed them in this simple-to-complex order:

 Perception (sensory guiding of motor activity)

 Set (feeling ready to act)
 Guided Response (beginning to learn complex skills)
 Mechanism (developing basic proficiency)
 Complex Overt Response (performing with advanced skill)
 Adaptation (modifying movement to meet special circumstances)
 Origination (creating situation-specific movements)