Affective Assessment

    The affective domain refers to attitudes, values, beliefs, interests, and emotions. According to the readings we’ve done for this week, affective assessments are an important, yet often forgotten, part of academic curricula. The importance of the affective domain stems from its connection to student engagement and motivation. Students, after all, are kids, and they can easily lose interest in something if they don’t see the value in it. If students don’t see how a class is relevant to the real-world, they quickly become unmotivated and lose their passion for learning. This could mean the students pay less attention, put less effort into their work, or even drop the course all together. If the course is required for graduation, a disinterested student will simply do the minimum required to pass. As we’ve learned in the past, this kind of performance orientation is far less effective for learning than a mastery orientation is. What’s the point in taking a class if all of the information learned and skills acquired are forgotten after the class ends?

    If affective assessment is that critical to a student’s education, why isn’t it used more often? It seems to me that many teachers don’t know how to properly design and use an affective assessment, consequently leading them to neglect the affective domain and strongly favor the cognitive domain. Perhaps, in this era of high-stakes standardized testing, many teachers feel that focusing on affective assessments is too time-consuming. Even from my limited experience as a teacher and previous experience as a student, I know that covering all the material in the short amount of time given can be difficult, often resulting in teachers rushing through material at the end of the semester and dropping inquiry-based learning projects from the curriculum altogether.

In my opinion, this is unacceptable. The readings we’ve studied this week make it clear that the affective domain is as important as the cognitive domain. After all, students who aren’t motivated to learn and don’t value the curriculum will not put forth the effort necessary to succeed. It also seems that affective assessments are quicker and easier to implement than one might initially suspect. Most of the affective assessments I’ve looked at have fewer than twenty items, and they can easily be included in formative assessments such as Kahoot quizzes to provide the instructor with anonymous results.

In my future classrooms, I envision myself using affective assessments alongside cognitive ones to monitor the student learning process. For example, I could use a diagnostic assessment to not only assess prior knowledge, but to determine if students understand the importance of a particular unit. If students seem to understand the real-world relevance of a unit, it might not be necessary to spend extra time explicitly stating that relevance. If however, the students don’t value a unit such as ecology, I could take the time to help them see it’s importance using examples of conservation biology or climate change. I could then use inquiry-based research projects to help students become more interested in a topic by giving them more control over their learning. I would continue to track these affective variables using formative assessments, including Kahoot quizzes.  Not all assessments need to be that formal. Informal discussions with students can tell you a lot about their disposition. If a teacher’s job is truly to guide students along the learning process, monitoring and evaluating the affective domain is of critical importance, even if it’s not for a grade.