Instructional objectives perform two major functions for designers, instructors and teachers. First they assist in selecting and organizing instructional activities for the instructional designers and organize the resources that facilitate effective learning activities. The resultant unit of instruction is highly focused. Second, the instructional objectives provide a way for evaluating the students and measuring their progress using the relevant tests. Our center of focus is on the objective development. There are three objective domains that can be classified to make instructional decisions. They include cognitive, psychomotor and affective.
Appreciations, values, attitudes and emotions like respecting, enjoying and conserving are entailed in the affective domain. This area is believed to be very important in education and exercise instructional objectives. The levels of an affective domain form a range for attitudinal behavior from simple responsiveness and reception to internalization as attitudes become part of an individual’s assessment practicing system. Writing objectives for the affective domain includes more intellectual behaviors as attitudes, appreciations and feelings. These are difficult to observe and measure. One of the methods used is for the fashionable to observe the behaviors indirectly and to infer from what she or he can observe. What a learner says or does is assumed to be confirmation of conduct concerning to an affective objective.
Most of the instructional attention is received using a cognitive domain. It includes solving, knowledge, predicting, naming and other knowledgeable features of education. It uses low information and higher coherent abilities as understanding, application, synthesis, analysis and assessment. The current situation dictates writing of objectives in the cognitive domain. They can be written in two ways. The behavioral approach where they are very brief and the cognitive approach which is very comprehensive.
Skills requiring coordination and use of skeletal muscles use psychomotor domain in their construction, manipulating and perming. Most muscular engagements required in performing a function are resulting from this nomenclature. Because every person requires using a different set of muscles, this can be better organized by giving attention to gross then fine movements. Writing objectives for the psychomotor domain is very easy. The psychomotor skills are the most easily observed of the three domains. Objectives on this domain rely on the same four parts. However, the emphasis given is very different. Psychomotor behaviors are unambiguous and require more exact criteria.
After finalizing the task analysis and identified the objectives, you are ready to sequence your objectives. Sequencing is the competent arrangement of content in such a way as to help the student achieve the objectives in a well-organized and effective way. The most common sequencing method is the prerequisite method whereby a learning pyramid that recognizes skills that are reliant on on other skills is adopted. The prerequisite skills are first trained.
The second tactic for sequencing was described by Posner and Strike. This is set of schemes for sequencing the directives centered on work-related, concept-related and learning-related content. The most current approach is the one outlined by English and Reigeluth as part of Reigeluth’s theory.
