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Instructional Technology Portfolio | Introduction to Instructional Design Login | Résumé | IT Portfolio | Home |
Instruction is a set of events that facilitates learning. Assumptions: Aid in learning, immediate and long-range, systematic design can greatly affect learning, systems approach, based on prevailing theories of learning. Basic principles: contiguity, repetition, and reinforcement.
Instructional System Design is a systematic and multi-stage process of defining instructional goals, analyzing needs, defining the learner, setting performance objectives, strategizing instruction, choosing materials, and performing evaluations of learners as well as effectiveness of the instructional system itself.
Designing instruction allows attainment of educational goals. Goals are expressed in categories of human activity and are derived from working backwards from desired outcomes. Five categories of learning outcomes: Intellectual Skills, Cognitive Strategies, Verbal Information, Motor Skills, and Attitudes. Grouping into human capabilities make possible different kinds of human performance.
Intellectual skills enable functioning in society through use of symbols and relations. These skills are categorized by complexity and includes: discrimination, concrete and defined concepts, rules, and cognitive strategies. Cognitive strategies are further distinguished by being domain independent and generally supporting information processing.
Verbal knowledge is the learning of information such as labels, facts, generalizations, and organized information. Attitude is concerned with emotion and action that determines a learner’s choice and course of action. Motor skills are learned physical skills accomplished by repeated practice. All three have very different conditions of effective achievement.
The learners may have various different levels of learned capabilities, schemas (memory storage), abilities and traits. The instructional designer must be cognizant of these differences as they relate to instructional outcomes and reduce the learner diversity to a manageable subset that makes instructional planning feasible.
Advocates precise definition of performance objectives through the use of the five-component objective which specifies: the performance situation; the type of learned capability; the object; specific actions of the learner; and the tools, constraints, or special conditions of performance.
Task analysis yields systematic decomposition of skills and information necessary to plan and design instructional material. Procedural task analysis breaks down the skill itself whilst learning task analysis addresses the attainment of the skills. Relationships between essential and supportive prerequisites and task classification are manifested through learning task analysis.
Curriculum should be ordered from simple to complex, general to specific, known to unknown. Course sequencing takes place at multiple levels and scope and is based upon learning hierarchies. Performance outcomes can have various levels: lifelong, end-of-course, unit, specific performance, and enabling objectives.
Nine instructional events: gain attention, inform learner, stimulate recall, present information, guide, elicit performance, provide feedback, assess and enhance are directly related to internal information processing. Depending upon the situation and learners, some events may need to be emphasized or omitted, or may be provided by the learners themselves.
The media selection procedures must consider physical factors, learning task, and learner variables. The choice of media is dictated by learning situation, the five types of learning outcomes and the learning environment. Media selection should be rational, based upon theory and research pertaining to learning effectiveness.
Design of lesson plans are governed by time allotted and desired learning outcomes. Lessons should incorporate effective learning conditions through the nine instructional events: Gaining attention; stating objective; stimulating recall; presenting stimulus material; providing guidance; eliciting performance; providing feedback; assessing performance; enhancing retention. Teachers have personal influence at lesson level.
Performance measures provide for student placement, diagnosis of difficulties, checking progress, reporting to parents, and evaluation of instruction. Objective-referenced assessment directly measure student performance against clearly prescribed course objectives. Norm-referenced measures compare student performance relatively and against that of a group and typically measure a mixture of objectives.
Three group sizes and instructional characteristics: two-person (tutoring); small (discussions, interactive recitation); and large (lecture). Instructional events vary in form and feasibility of use by group size. Precision of control degrades as group size increases. Introducing precision of management of instructional events (mastery learning) to large groups is highly effective.
Individualized instruction is characterized by: Modules which are distinctly self-instructional; materials incorporated are more direct and less teacher dependent; can adapt to student learning preferences. Modules tend to contain all materials, exercises, and tests needed to achieve stated objectives and provides more frequent feedback and progress checks than conventional lessons.
Formative evaluation provides indication of instructional program's worth for purposes of improving and revising the program as it is under development. Summative valuation, done after design work is finished, captures conclusions regarding effectiveness of the educational program. Effects of following three variables must be considered: Aptitude; process; and support variables.
The authors did not seem to exalt any one principle so much as they seemed to impart on the reader to simply be aware, especially at the outset of the project. That is, the instructional designer should:
The Instructional Designer that fully grasps the significance of all the various components and understands the ramifications of choices made in each stage of the instructional design process, he/she will have a very high probability of producing solid instructional materials. When the Instructional Designer fully appreciates the fact that it is not what the students learn during the course, but what it is they will be doing outside the course and designs accordingly, then I believe the Instructional Designer is fully aware and this is the essential theme of the book, Principles of Instructional Design by Gagné, Briggs, and Wager.
I develop and support software applications that run against Oracle’s database management system (DBMS), which is one of the most complex systems to setup and run properly. When discussing the speed of application performance and how to improve it, such is often very difficult to explain to non-technical business managers, especially as performance boosts can come from many different aspects of the Oracle DBMS and total software solution. The goal is for the manager to know what tuning actions are possible, why they are necessary and how long each type of action takes.
The managers must first learn the vocabulary and terminology used by software developers before they can understand the nuisances of tuning a database application. Thus, the principles of instructional sequence and decomposition should be used to break down subject and organize instructional material such that enabling objectives are presented in logical order and adequately supports the performance objective.
The following steps will be followed to accurately identify the learner’s initial knowledge level and vocabulary in order to build the instructional material:
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