Essay for Psychology Students on Cognitive Domain of Learning

Human behaviour has a dynamic quality that keeps changing in response to various stimuli which it receives from the environment.

From infancy we are continually learning new skills gaining information about the environment around us and developing contain beliefs and attitudes. These in a way form the domains or areas of learning. These domains are not mutually exclusive.

Rather they overlap each other. Therefore learning is not considered to belong to any particular domain. In other works, for example psychomotor development requires proper knowledge or understanding i.e. cognitive development on the part of the students.

Cognitive Domain:

The word cognitive originates from the word cognition which means to know. In educational processes learning mainly focuses upon the cognitive domain. Learning processes in the cognitive domain are associated with those mental operations which are used to manipulate information from the environment.

In this way, cognitive domain involves a number of activities varying from exposure to information to its organization or processing in the learner’s mind. This information can include visual forms which involve seeing as it could be verbal i.e. hearing or listening.

Various psychologists and educationists like Boom, Ground Meager, etc. have tried to analyze the learning of the cognitive domain.

(a) Knowledge:

Possession of knowledge or information is the foundation from which all higher thinking grows. Data facts concepts or principles are memorized at this level of learning.

(b) Comprehension:

The second level of learning is comprehension. At this level those mental operations which help in understanding of facts, concepts, principles and generalizations are included.

In other words, the meaningful processing of information takes place after the recognition or identification of kind of information.

1. Translation:

Here the student transforms known concept or definition into his own words or phrases.

2. Interpretation:

Here the student tries to find out interrelations among the various recognizable components of any information (like data, facts, concept, principles, generalization theory and so on).

3. Extrapolation:

This involves sortie kind of predictions or drawing conclusions keeping in mind the situations which are beyond those given to the student.

(c) Application:

Information becomes meaningful when it is applied to a new situation. The mental operations at this level involve the use of concepts, principles or theories in real or concrete situations.

(d) Analysis:

When information gathered is broken down into its constituent elements or arts, such that the relationship among parts becomes clear. We say that the information is being analyzed.

(e) Synthesis:

It involves arranging and combining the various parts in such a way as to form a pattern or structure which might not have been clearly perceptible earlier.

(f) Evaluation:

The mental operations at this level involve making of judgement which may be based either on the criteria of consistency or logic as may involve some comparison with standard or norms.

All the six levels of mental operations have been taken up (in increasing order of complexity) in the hierarchy of levels in learning. Thus any cognitive level should involve the earlier ones.

Again, knowledge comprehension and application are more clearly liked in the hierarchy than the three other levels in the cognitive domain.