Beyond Cognitive Assessment: Teachers Attitudes towards Assessing Psychomotor and Affective Domains of Students’ Behaviors in Classrooms in North Central-Nigeria

Abstract

Education is one of the best patrimonies a nation can give to her citizens. Education is imperative in the development of any nation or community of the world. To achieve quality educational goals as prescribed in the National Policy on Education, education should focus on students in totality-cognitive, affective and psychomotor skills in order to produce students that are balanced physically, emotionally and intellectually and this can be done achieved via assessment. This study was carried out to investigate secondary school teachers’ attitudes toward assessing the affective and psychomotor domains of students’ behaviors in classrooms. The study adopted a survey research design. The population for the study consisted of all the secondary school teachers in North Central geo-political zone, Nigeria. A sample of 450 teachers was randomly composed for the study. Data was collected using a questionnaire developed by researchers and validated by experts in Psychology and Measurement and Evaluation.. The data collected was analyzed using descriptive statistics of Means and Standard Deviation to answer the research questions parametric statistic of dependent t-test to test the hypothesis at 0.05level of significance. The findings revealed that, the secondary school teachers have positive attitudes towards assessing affective and psychomotor domain of students’ behaviors in classrooms. It was also found that, their attitudes towards assessing affective and psychomotor domains of students’ behaviors do not differ significantly. The researchers recommended that, Government should make efforts to ensure the sustainability of comprehensive assessment by using the school administrators to continue to stress its relevance in schools. Workshops/seminars should be organized for teachers to enable them acquire more skills required to effectively carry out non-cognitive assessment.

Keywords: Education, Assessment, Attitudes, Affective domain, Psychomotor domain, Cognitive domain