Explain why teachers should pay attention to taxonomies of educational outcomes. Include in your discussion an explanation of the necessity of aligning objectives with instruction and assessment

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Taxonomies help teachers avoid two common faults: ignoring whole classes of potential outcomes, such as affective and psychomotor outcomes, and writing too many objectives at the lowest level of a taxonomy. In the cognitive domain, for example, learning exclusively at the knowledge level does not help children learn how to relate new ideas to one another, transfer ideas to other areas, synthesize new information with old, or look critically at their own or other people's ideas.
It is also important to align objectives with instruction and assessment. It would be a wasted effort to formulate and use objectives to plan for instruction without using those same objectives to plan for the assessment of student achievement. It is not possible to draw conclusions about whether or not students have achieved the objectives if they are not assessed at the same level specified by the objective. Teachers must formulate appropriate test items for paper-and-pencil tests; true-false, multiple-choice, and essay items measure different levels of student learning. Teachers must also determine the type of assessment to use—alternative assessments such as portfolios, performances, and projects are frequently the most appropriate assessment tools for higher cognitive outcomes.