Dr. Benjamin Bloom is an educational psychologist who was interested in human learning. Consequently, in 1965, he and his associates developed Bloom’s taxonomy, a framework for classifying, comprehending, and addressing learning. They developed a framework consisting of two components: thinking and the capacity to apply knowledge, followed by feelings and emotions.
The cognitive components of learning about gravity would include the comprehension of the idea that an object is being pulled toward the Earth by a force, as well as concepts like acceleration, mass, and so forth. The student will be able to apply (psychomotor) her newly acquired knowledge and skills in novel contexts as soon as she has developed an understanding. She might wish to observe, for instance, whether the object would accelerate the same way if a different action were taken to it.
This process of learning takes place in a social environment. It happens in the affective domain, which the model names interactions with teachers and peers. These are the aspects of education that influence the growth of the emotions. Interest, drive, and values components would support the student in developing social skills necessary for group work while also assisting her in appreciating the ideas and the discussion. In the end, the growth of this field helps larger communities and society at large.
According to some researchers, incorporating technology into instruction raises students’ performance on tests. Others contend that since traditional teaching methods are still widely used, technology has little effect on students’ performance.
The use of technology as a tool has been the subject of much research in this field. But how useful is technology as a tool to guarantee that students construct knowledge and to promote interactions amongst parents, teachers, and students—thereby utilizing the affective domain?
Along with other scholars from Brunel University in London and the Mauritius Institute of Education, my goal was to find out how technology could be utilized to change the traditional classroom into a creative, interactive space that fosters students’ affective domain-driven cognitive development. Thus, we started a study in an effort to make a case for the use of technology in the affective domain in physics education.
A place where the affective domain can grow
The research was conducted in two stages: investigative and assessment. The exploratory phase’s findings were validated during the evaluative phase.
In the exploratory phase, there was one teacher, twenty-two students (all 13 and 14 years old) from a coeducational school in the central region of Mauritius, and nineteen parents.
In the assessment stage, thirty-one pupils from a school exclusively for girls (located in the same area as the primary school), fifteen parents, and a single physics instructor took part.
The Pedagogical Technological Integrated Medium is the framework that we created. Its foundation is the well-researched TPACK framework, designed to make using technology in the classroom easier. Through interactions between teachers, students, and parents, our framework supports learners’ creation of knowledge and understanding of physics.
We developed a user-friendly website to track how educators, parents, and students interacted with the framework. There are a number of tasks on the site that involve student-teacher interactions in the classroom, parent-student interactions at home, and parent-student interactions outside of the classroom.
Students utilized the website, for example, to reinforce what they already knew about the physics concept of measurement. Together with their parents, they completed this before class.
The results of the experiment demonstrated how much the strategy we had chosen helped learners. The students were able to construct their knowledge of physics by establishing the affective domain through interactions with their teachers and parents at school. We employed technology as a means to achieve this, which gave the situation an extra layer.
The advantages of our strategy
Teachers, parents, and students all praised the framework. A parent informed us:
That my daughter was talking to me made me happy, and I urged her to finish all of the assignments and to let me know if she ran into any problems.
In order to “learn better,” students stated, they desired to complete more tasks and have access to more notes on the website. Someone stated,
Before learning about it [the concept] in school, I would like to give it a try.
The educators were content as well. As per one participant, “I can now identify the specific areas where students have misconceptions thanks to the activities in the web lesson.” Additionally, the instructor celebrated the opportunity to “innovate in my teaching.”
The ability of parents, students, and teachers to work together has been demonstrated by the affective domain’s integration into our model. The instructor built a network with parents and students and used the knowledge she acquired to create engaging lessons.
The schools that we collaborated with intend to maintain the teacher-student-parent relationship by means of the website. Our intention is to implement this system in additional Mauritius schools.
Affective domain relevance education
The results of our study show that students’ attitudes have changed; they now claim to be more engaged, motivated, and equipped to learn new material in the classroom.
The potential that educational technology presents for cognitive development in science learning has long been recognized. It has been demonstrated that this is insufficient if the affective domain is not incorporated into the process of teaching and learning when technology is used.
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