Love, Shock & Awe: Cognitive-Affective Strategies to Engage Adult Learners

 

Inundated with media and entertainment, some college students become jaded. Educators compete with Twitter and Snapchat just to get their students’ attention. Flashy websites for Fantasy Football and Shoedazzle dwarf faculty blogs. In this information age, it is difficult to engage students in course content through traditional methods. However, college instructors who use cognitive-affective strategies make learning an experience rather than an objective.

Adult learners engage when they find material relevant to their lives. Socratic, faculty-centered lectures may be sufficient for relaying information for regurgitation, but they lend very little to meaningful, lifelong learning experiences. Traditional peer-review activities may be sufficient for daily interaction, but more strategic interplay is needed for students to learn to negotiate diversity in the real world. Assigning cultural activities may be sufficient for exposing students to the larger community, but deeper applications are necessary for them to realize that they make culture every day.

Many college instructors incorporate thinking and feeling teaching domains without realizing it, while others reject the feeling domain altogether. These strategies may be incorporated in short intervals throughout the term. The following articles explore the scholarship of teaching and learning in the affective domain:

Buchanan, Michael T. and Brendan Hyde. "Learning beyond the surface: engaging the cognitive, affective and spiritual dimensions with the curriculum." International Journal of Children's Spirituality, 2008.

The cognitive dimension of learning is an integral part of the learning dynamic. However, the roles of thinking, feeling and reflecting/intuiting are complementary within this process.

Miller, Mary. "Teaching and Learning in Affective Domain." Emerging Perspectives on Learning, Teaching and Technology, 2015.

Simonson and Maushak (2001) have drawn on findings from a number of studies to create a series of six guidelines for effective design of attitude instruction. These are:

·       make the instruction realistic, relevant, and technically stimulating

·       present new information

·       present persuasive messages in a credible manner

·       elicit purposeful emotional involvement

·       involve the learner in planning, production or delivery of the message

·       provide post-instruction discussion or critique opportunities

Rimland, Emily. "Assessing Affective Learning Using a Student Response System." Libraries and the Academy, 2015.

Affective learning relates to students’ attitudes, emotions, and feelings. Becoming aware of the affective domain can increase learning, even influencing cognitive learning.

Wilson, Leslie Owen. "Three Domains of Learning – Cognitive, Affective, Psychomotor." Teaching Essentials. The Second Principle, 2015.

Additionally, if students are asked to challenge themselves with independently taking risks to develop and present a hypothesis and/or persuade others on drawn conclusions, or actively take an intellectual risk whereby they increase in self-confidence, these types of exercises also have the potential to be affective as well as a cognitive. 

Hoque, Enamul. “Three Domains of Learning: Cognitive, Affective and Psychomotor.” The Journal of EFL Education and Research, 2016.

Learning is not an event. It is a process. It is the continual growth and change in the brain's architecture that results from the many ways we take in information, process it, connect it, catalogue it, and use it (and sometimes get rid of it). Learning can generally be categorized into three domains: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor.