Fire & Emergency Services Instructor (6th Edition)
Chapter 4 Terms
Safety: The Instructor's Role
Affective Domain
Learning domain that involves emotions, feelings, and attitudes. Also see Learning Domain.
Andragogy
Study of adult education and its methods of teaching and learning.
Assignment
Work that must be performed by learners outside class in order to reach a skill level, meet an objective, and/or prepare for the next lesson.
Behavior
In psychology, any response or reaction to a stimulus, such as instruction, made by an organism such as the learner.
Behavioral Objective
Measurable and precise statement of intent that specifically describes behavior that the learner is expected to exhibit as a result of instruction. Behavioral objectives also indicate the conditions under which the behavior is to be performed (given certain equipment, a specific time period for completion, etc.) and the required standard of performance - a percentage (75 percent), a number (9 out of 10), a time constraint (within I minute), or an NFPA (or OSHA, SOP, etc.) requirement. The term is often interchangeably used with the terms educational objective, outcome objective, and enabling objective. Also see Enabling Objective, Objective (1), and Performance Objective.
Counseling
Advising learners or program participants on their educational progress, career opportunities, personal anxieties, or sudden crises in their lives.
Criteria
Standard(s) on which a decision or judgment is based.
Criterion Referenced Testing
Measurement of individual performance against a set standard or criterion, not against other individuals; mastery learning is the key element of criterion-referenced testing. Also see Mastery and Test.
Goal
Broad statement of educational intention that usually expresses what a training organization or instructor intends to do for the learner; contrast with the term objective, which states specifically what the learner will do.
Learning
Relatively permanent change in behavior that results from acquiring new information, practicing skills, or developing attitudes following some form of instruction.
Learning Contract
Formal agreement between learner and instructor that establishes an amount of work that must be finished in order to successfully complete a course.
Learning Domain
Distinct sphere or area of knowledge such as cognitive, psychomotor, or affective. Also see Affective Domain, Cognitive Domain, and Psychomotor Domain.
Learning Style
Learner's habitual manner of problem-solving, thinking, or learning, though the learner may not be conscious of his or her style and may adopt different styles for different learning tasks or circumstances.
Listening
Process of receiving, attending to, and assigning meaning to auditory stimuli; a process of steps that gives information that listeners try to understand.
Maslow Hierarchy of Needs
Theory put forth by psychologist Abraham Maslow that states that all human behavior is motivated by a drive to attain specific human needs in a progressive manner. The hierarchy begins with basic physiological needs and progresses through security, social, self-esteem, and self-actualization needs.
Memory
Individual record or past mental and sensory experience. Some aspect of memory can be measured by the individual's ability to recall, recognize, and relearn.
Motivation
Arousal and maintenance of behavior directed towards a goal. Motivation usually occurs in someone who is interested in achieving some goal.
Needs Analysis
Assessment of training needs that identifies the gap between what exists and what should exist; study of a selected group's needs for the purpose of providing appropriate training or equipment to satisfy those needs.
Psychomotor Domain
Learning domain that requires coordination between mind and muscle; that is, demonstrating the cognitive knowledge of riding a bike, tying a shoe, climbing a ladder, applying a splint, etc. Also see Learning Domain.
Reliability
Extent to which a test or test item consistently shows the same results or scores given to a set of learners on different occasions or marked by different assessors or by the same assessors on different occasions.
Schema
Refers to conceptual or knowledge structure (a mental map) in our memory system that we use to interpret or think out information that is presented to our senses by the external environment. When our senses are presented with a new object or situation, we match it against our existing knowledge or schema and act upon it based on our experience. If we don't have the appropriate knowledge or experience, we change the schema or develop additional ones. We develop more sophisticated and differentiated schemata as we gain new knowledge and encounter more experiences.
Taxonomy
Classification system in which each separate class of items is given a name and contains items that are more like one another than like items in other classes. Examples are the Dewey Decimal System and Bloom's Taxonomy of Objectives for the Cognitive Domain.