THE THREE TYPES OF LEARNING

Believing that there were more than one (1) type of learning, Benjamin Bloom and a
committee of colleagues in 1956, identified three domains of educational activities;

 the cognitive, referring to mental skills;

 affective referring to growth in feeling or emotion; and
 psychomotor, referring to manual or physical skills.

These terms were regarded as too technical by practicing teachers and so the domains
were translated to simpler terms commonly used by teachers; knowledge, skills and
attitudes (KSA).

These domains are organized into categories or levels and arranged in hierarchical order
from the simplest behavior to the most complex behavior. To ensure that the learning
outcomes are measurable, demonstrable and verifiable, the outcomes should be stated as
concrete and active verbs. In mid-nineties, a former student of Bloom, Lorin Anderson,
reviewed the cognitive domain objectives and effected some changes. The two most
prominent of these are (a) changing the names in the six subdivisions from noun to verb
and (b) slightly re-arranging the order. The following pages show the 3 taxonomies in
learning.

COGNITIVE DOMAIN: BLOOM’S TAXONOMY

 PSYCHOMOTOR DOMAIN: SIMPSON, DAVE AND HARROW
(Simplified and Re-Organized Categories or Levels of Learning in the Psychomotor
Domain)

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 AFFECTIVE DOMAIN (KRATHWOOL, DAVID R. AND BENJAMIN BLOOM)

Source: Navarro R., Santos R. and Corpuz, B., (2017) Assessment of Learning 1 (Third) Lorimar Publishing
Inc.