Blog #3 week ending Sept. 20, 2007

Entry #1

In our book it states that there are five domains in which learning occurs: cognitive, affective, motor, psychomotor, and metacognitive. It has useful information on four of the five, for example, the use of tables to help better understand the domains. However, for metacognitive they state it is least written about and least understood. But why? I do agree with the book that the metacognitive domain is the most important of all the domains. It is a combination of all of the domains. People learn things in different ways and the metacognitive domain focuses on the different ways people learn how to accomplish a number of things; whether it is through repetition, hands-on, etc. Knowing what works best for you when learning and fine tuning it throughout your life you will be able to learn at a much faster rate. I believe in time more people will have a better understanding of why the metacognitive domain is the most important and will be able to help others find their best way to learn.

Entry #2

In class we are at the beginning stages of our design project and when designing a project you need to make sure the learner knows what the objectives are. I found writing objectives to be more difficult than I thought. When writing objectives there are number of things you need to keep in mind. After looking over the material assigned to us for an assignment I believe I am getting a better understanding of how to write good objectives. In the homework we had to supply our own suggestions to writing objectives and I was going to explain why I think these suggestions are important.

1. Make sure the objective states what the learner is to get out of training – when completing the training if the learner doesn’t know what they are there for they won’t be interested in learning the new material.

2. Include the level that the learner will be able to perform at – when writing the objective it is important to let the learner know if what is being taught is too high or to low for them to comprehend.

3. Make sure the learner understands what is being asked from them – it is important to write the objective in a structure the learner will best understand using words or phrases the learner doesn’t understand turns them away from the training.

4. Make sure the objective is something the learner can reach – giving objectives that are too high to reach can tend to make the learner lose interest because it takes too much time

5. Make sure each objective includes a condition, performance, and criterion – when writing objectives make sure the learner knows what materials/tasks they are given, what they need to do with those, and how much needs to be done from them.

I could still use so more helpful information in writing objectives and hopefully we will learn more in class.