Week 1: Prescriptive Principles for Instructional Design

Summary


I've read over this paper three or four times now and I'm not sure I wholly understand all that it's saying. It's often quite dense and introduces some terms without much explication, such as "principled skill decomposition," leading me to believe that the authors presume some advanced knowledge of arcane instructional terms, i.e., a graduate education degree. I'm in business, not education, so I lack such a background. Also, some of the charts are quite hard to follow and decode; were I these authors' editor, I would have sent much of this back for revisions and clarification. Even assuming some familiarity with the field, it is often obtuse. Nonetheless, I'll do the best with what knowledge I have.


The authors identify five "first principles" of instruction -- principles that promote learning -- that are common to multiple theories of instructional design: a task-centered approach (seeing examples of and applying skills and undertaking "whole tasks"); activation (recalling or demonstrating prior knowledge); demonstration (seeing the skills in question put to action); application (using new knowledge and receiving feedback on their performance); and integration (putting new knowledge to work in real life).


The authors then proceed to present a number of instructional theories which are compared against the first principles, and present a number of what I'll call "systems" for employing these first principles, such as e-learning and multimedia learning. The effect is to demonstrate that the principles are embodied in a wide range of instructional design theories, and can be applied in a wide range of systems.


Critique


I'll begin by noting my discomfort with the writers' presentation. I still don't know what a "whole task" is (are not all tasks, and their component parts, by definition whole?), but I will presume they speak of a sequence of actions resulting in a completed product, such as finding two fractions' common denominators or assembling a widget. In any case, my lack of knowledge may lead to errant conclusions here.


Second, I can assent to the first principles with little difficulty; in retrospect I know that I've seen them applied in my own learning experience and, without knowing it, have applied them myself in corporate training classes. If I were to paraphrase them for my own training context, they would look something like this:

• Here's what we're going to learn how to do, and here's what it looks like when done properly
• This new thing is a lot like what we've done before but adds some important new steps; or: This new thing changes much of what we've done before in an effort to make it better
• Watch a step-by-step demonstration (or: Watch a demonstration of the first step; now try it yourself; repeat for all steps.)
• Now try it yourself; I'll offer tips if you do something incorrectly or can't figure something out
• Now let's commit to putting these new skills to work on the job.

I was pleased to see that the authors included Foshay et al's Cognitive Training Model (pp. 178-180). I and a team of classmates employed this model in designing a video-shooting class for newspaper writers for our project in R521, and it worked to very good effect. Relating the new skills to existing knowledge and encouraging students that they could learn the new skills without great difficulty proved to be invaluable and made the lesson more enjoyable and efficient. All went on the use the new skills on the job, sometimes repeatedly; one who was especially concerned about learning the new skills has become a productive photo and video shooter.


I'll be paying special attention, too, to Allen's e-learning principles (table 14.2, p. 179) as the semester progresses; these strike me as the sort of principles worth keeping in mind when designing my project for use in my workplace (the nature of the project must still be negotiated). 




References:
Merrill, D., Barclay, M. & van Schaak (2008). Prescriptive Principles for Instructional Design. Downloaded May 6, 2011, from class resources in Oncourse.