The purpose of frameworks in education is to offer a combination of options to assist instructors in designing a course. The author of our text book speaks of three different frameworks that can be used to design a course. Each framework focuses on something different than the other; however, they all serve the same purpose and that is to assist in a course design that is suitable for the students.
Bloom's and Anderson and Krathwohl's Framework.
In the United States, from the late 1950s into the early 1970s, there were attempts to dissect and classify the varied domains of human learning – cognitive (knowing, or head), affective (feelings, or heart) and psychomotor (doing, or kinesthetic, tactile, haptic or hand/body). The resulting efforts yielded a series of taxonomies for each area (Wilson, 2013). Bloom (1956), Anderson and Krathwohls (2000) taxonomy focuses on a learning hierarchy. "They posit that to be able to perform one level of thinking, learners must be able to perform all the lower-order thinking operations. By extension, a well-designed course should sequence the learning outcomes to lead students up the hierarchy" (Nilson, 2010, p 25). The main focus of this framework is to increase knowledge (cognitive domain), develop skills (psychomotor domain), or develop emotional aptitude or balance (affective domain). .
This framework provides instructors with a focus for developing their course learning objectives. It serves as a guideline for developing sub-goals and it offers different ways of assessing if the goals have been met. An appropriate environment for this framework would be a medical or law school. The practice of medicine, law, and other professions is all about applying knowledge to new, often complicated situations. But before applying knowledge, professionals have to analyze the elements of the problematic situation, evaluate what knowledge and disciplinary algorithms are most useful and relevant to the situation, and synthesize (or create)a problem-solving strategy-for example, a legal approach or a medical diagnosis and treatment plan.