Social studies objectives should integrate content, skills, and affect. Content objectives deal primarily with the acquisition of information. Students need to learn facts about the subject they are studying. Skills objectives deal primarily with learning procedures which can be applied to material other than the subject currently being studied. Affective objectives deal with students’ values, feelings, and experiences.
Very few curricula set forth objectives at all three levels and integrate these objectives successfully. Most social studies teachers teach content sometimes successfully but give little attention to the other two areas. The history of social studies education over the last twenty years is the story of attempts to emphasize skills or affect at the expense of content. Inquiry-structure proponents such as Edwin Fenton helped teachers train their students to think like historians, sociologists, etc., but the inquiry-structure method neglects the affective domain. Sid Simon’s values clarification method glorifies affect but ignores content and skills.
As a curriculum developer, I have two assumptions: 1) The three types of objectives are equally important and 2) The three types of objectives must be integrated for the curriculum to be truly effective. Of course, I haven’t always practiced what I preach. As a beginning teacher, I tended to overemphasize affective objectives at the expense of skills objectives. Lately I’ve been trying not only to integrate the three levels, but to develop a model for doing so.
In this unit the content objectives focus on questions such as:
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1. What are the different types of plea-bargaining?
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2. How prevalent is plea-bargaining?
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3. When and how did plea-bargaining develop in New Haven and throughout the country?
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4. What happens during a trial?
Skills objectives for this unit are concerned with both data collection and data interpretation. When collecting data on plea-bargaining in New Haven, students will learn how to use primary sources such as court records and newspaper articles. Interviewing skills will also be stressed. Data interpretation will be the second skills objective of the unit. Some of these skills will be specific. For example, students will be provided graphs and tables on plea-bargaining throughout the country and asked, “What do these graphs tell us about the incidence of plea-bargaining? Some data, however, will be historical. This data will be used to develop broader interpretive skills. We will ask questions such as “What factors led to the increase in plea-bargaining during the twentieth century?”
Affective objectives are closely related to both content and skills objectives. Asking students to evaluate a procedure such as plea-bargaining and to make suggestions for public policy requires that students think and feel how plea-bargaining affects both the accused and the rest of society.
