Teaching school science within the cognitive and affective domains

The school curriculum often covers the cognitive, affective and psychomotor learning domains. In classroom, science is usually taught within the cognitive domain while the psychomotor learning domain is achieved through performing science experiments in the laboratory. Although students attend civic and moral education (CME) and pastoral care classes where values and soft skills are taught to them directly, learning experiences in most school subjects such as science are still focused on high stakes examinations. It is therefore not surprising that affective domain learning outcomes are often the least considered when teachers plan or conduct their science lessons. With globalization and advancement in information technology, skills within the affective domain are becoming more relevant as these become the “must-have’s” for the 21st century worker-citizen (Ministry of Education, MoE, 2012; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, 2012). Thus, the question that educators and teachers may need to ask is “How can we teach and prepare the younger generation to be that effective 21st century worker-citizen with an inquiring mind and a compassionate heart?” This paper is not an attempt to answer this question. However, it aims to share some ideas on how a typical school-based science lesson can be used to help students surface values and life skills so often mentioned by educators and business management experts as important to the 21st century society and workplaces (OECD, 2012). It is the belief of the teachers participating in this initiative that school science as an examination subject is usually taken seriously by students in class, and while they are seriously learning the subject their teacher can take the opportunity to help them surface values, positive social habits and effective life skills.

In this school-based initiative, secondary school students were taught science concepts using the usual classroom teaching-learning approaches that would effectively prepare them for high stakes examinations. The critical component of the science lessons, however, was the reflective activities on daily life experiences. The objectives of this cognitive-affective integrative approach to conducting school science lessons are: (1) to teach science concepts so that students understand them well enough to use them in solving conceptual problems, and (2) to develop an awareness among the students of the various values, positive social habits or life skills that they can relate to by drawing analogies with the science concepts learnt.

This exemplary integrative teaching approach was developed from the teaching experiences of the participating teachers and the ideas shared in the literature on how students are motivated to learn (Brophy, 2004; Stiggins, Arter, Chappuis and Chappuis, 2009). The teachers are convinced that when students understand the science concepts (within the cognitive domain) and are able to apply their new found knowledge and skills in completing or solving everyday life science-related tasks and problems, they will also be motivated to continue learning about values and life skills within the affective domain. The three trial lessons will therefore be used to identify the potential benefits and limitations of this cognitive-affective integrative approach to teaching school science, values and life skills.

Learning school science in the affective domain

All trained educators would be familiar with the cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains of learning described by Bloom (1956). These domains of learning are still applicable in all areas of learning (Buehl, 2009; Krathwohl, Bloom & Masia, 1964). However, the affective domain, unlike the other two, remains the least applied. It is a common observation among teachers and educators that students, especially those in high stake examination systems, often put learning objectives in this domain at the lowest of priorities. After all, few examination boards, if any, emphasize the assessment of learning objectives in the affective domain. This situation may explain the difficulties faced by teachers to teach values and life skills in class (Krathwohl, Bloom & Masia, 1964; Martin & Briggs, 1986). There are also many challenges to assessing affective learning outcomes in ways that are objective and reliable (Anderson & Bourke, 2000; Popham, 2010). Despite these hurdles, no examination authority would omit the affective domain learning objectives in their syllabuses. Usually there will be sections or brief descriptions on how values and life skills can be incorporated into the science curriculum, but most of these are left to the interpretation of the individual teachers teaching science in the classroom.

With these difficulties in incorporating affective learning objectives in mind, the teachers participating in this project recognized the importance of helping students do well in science examinations while at the same time supporting efforts to help the same group of students learn values, positive social habits and effective life skills. The strategy is to integrate learning objectives in both cognitive and affective domains by employing what may be described as a “reversed analogy”.

The use of analogy is well documented in the science education literature (Abell and Lederman, 2007; Harrison and Coll, 2008). Briefly, it involves explaining an abstract science concept (referred to as the target) to students by first describing an everyday life experience (referred to as the analogue) that may hold some resemblance to the science concept being taught (Harrison and Coll, 2008). For examples, the “lock-and-key” model is frequently used to explain the specificity of enzyme action, and teaching students how to classify objects is a common strategy chemistry teachers use when introducing the concept of periodicity of elements. When students see the similarities between something they are familiar with, they are more likely to understand the concept. In fact, they may even retain their learning longer and apply it to new situations by simply remembering the analogy (Harrison and Coll, 2008). In this manner, the use of a “reversed analogy” can similarly help students retain their understanding and appreciation of a value or positive social habit (the target) if these can be explained using a newly learnt science concept or skill (the analogue). The lesson trials described in this paper are therefore examples on the use of “reversed analogies” in school science. By using this strategy, teachers can adopt the cognitive-affective integrative approach to help students reflect and surface values and life skills (identified as the targets) from their learning experiences in science classes (where the analogues for the reversed analogies are created).