BLOOM'S TAXONOMY AND HIV/AIDS PROGRAM

The proposed study will provide an AIDS eduction program to 1,200 students (boys and girls) between the ages of 12 and 15 years. In an effort to test the effectiveness of the program regarding teaching students about HIV/AIDS relationships and methods of disease transmission, all program participants will be pretested and posttested regarding these knowledge areas.

The designed program has several instructional components. These include lectures, interactive seminars, and videos on a broad variety of HIV/AIDS related issues and concerns. These issues include the following topics: the difference between HIV and AIDS; the nature of the HIV virus versus the virus that produces the common cold; ways which HIV can and cannot be transmitted; how to identify an AIDS patient (only by a blood test); safe sex practices and abstinence.

A key question that must be asked relative to the proposed program design and evaluation is whether it can be justified on pedagogical grounds as an effective method of knowledge transmission. In other words, is there reason to believe that an educational program designed in the manner of this program will be an effective vehicle for learning? Regarding the question, it can be stated that it is the contention here that the program design and evaluative methods can be justified as effective on the basis of Bloom's Taxonomy (see: Bloom, 1956).

Bloom's Taxonomy categorizes cognitive learning

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t program information be converted from short-term to long-term memory. It is contended here that although the program effects only short-term memory retention, it can be expected that periodic stimulation of this same information through different events and occurrences (e.g. radio and television advertisements about HIV/AIDS transmission, discussions with friends and family about HIV/AIDS related issues, etc.) will operate to eventually move the information from short to long-term memory structures in students' brains. In other words, it is expected that repetition of the information over time will cause it to be placed in students' long term memory. The foregoing contention can be justified based on a review of research examining relationships between repetition, short-term, and long-term memory. A representative sampling of this research is examined and discussed in this section of the review. Regarding the efficacy of repetition for memory, Hulme, Lee and Brown (1993) conducted a study in which rehearsal (repetition) was used to convert information into long-term memory in samples of normal subjects and subjects with Alzheimer's disease. One of the findings of the study was that while repetition of the material to be
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Approximate Word count = 5234
Approximate Pages = 21 (250 words per page)