Common Mistakes and Taxonomy of Objectives In Nursing Education

Taxonomy and Common Mistakes of Objectives In Nursing Education

Common Mistakes When Writing Objectives In Nursing Education,Taxonomy of Objectives According to Learning Domains.

Common Mistakes When Writing Objectives In Nursing Education

In creating behavioral objectives, many common mistakes can be easily made by novice and seasoned educators alike. The most frequent errors made in writing objectives are as follows:

Describing what the teacher does rather than what the learner is expected to do Including more than one expected behavior in a single objective (avoid using and to connect two verbs e.g, the learner will select and prepare)

• Forgetting to identify all four components of condition, performance, criterion, and who the learner is Using terms for performance that are open to many interpretations, are not action oriented, and are difficult to measure
• Writing objectives that are unattainable and unrealistic given the ability level of the learner
• Writing objectives that do not relate to the stated goal
• Cluttering objectives by including unnecessary information
• Being too general so as not to specify clearly the expected behavior to be achieved
• If you use the SMART rule, it is easy to create effective objectives for different audiences in various settings.

Taxonomy of Objectives According to Learning Domains

    A taxonomy is a way to categorize things according to how they are related to one another. For example, in science, biologists use taxonomies to classify plants and animals based on their natural characteristics. In the late 1940s, psychologists and educators became concerned about the need to develop a system for defining and ordering levels of behavior according to their type and complexity (Reilly & Oermann, 1990). 

    Bloom et al. (1956) and Krathwohl, Bloom, and Masia (1964) developed a very useful taxonomy, known as the taxonomy of educational objectives, as a tool for classifying behavioral objectives. This taxonomy is divided into three broad categories or domains: cognitive (thinking domain), affective (feeling domain), and psycho motor (doing or skills domain).

    Although these three domains of cognitive, affective, and psychomotor learning are described as existing as separate entities, they are interdependent and can be experienced simultaneously. Humans do not possess thoughts, feelings, and actions in isolation from one another and typically do not compartmentalize learning. 

    For example, the affective domain influences the cognitive domain, and vice versa; the processes of thinking (cognitive) and feeling (affective) influence psychomotor performance, and vice versa (Menix, 1996).

    In addition to each objective being classified by a domain, each domain is ordered in a taxonomic form of hierarchy. Behavioral objectives are classified into low, medium, and high levels, with simple behaviors listed first (at the lower end), followed by behaviors of moderate difficulty, with the more complex behaviors listed last (at the higher end). 

    This concept of hierarchy realizes that learners must successfully achieve behaviors at lower levels of the domains before they are able to adequately learn behaviors at higher levels of the domains. Thus, to use an analogy of climbing a ladder, you cannot get to the top unless you go up one step at a time.