Designing Conditions
Dr. Robert Gagné and Dr. Leslie Briggs first introduced me to "conditions of learning" showing me that we can design events for successful learning. While enrolled in the Instructional Systems program at Florida State University, Dee Andrews and I produced A Comparative Analysis of Models of Instructional Design as a research presentation and paper. It has since been cited in several books, included in graduate courses, and translated into several languages.
Linda Nilson and I integrated those conditions of learning and models of instructional design in our book of Online Teaching at its Best: Merging Instructional Design with Teaching and Learning Research.
Strategies for Learning
My own approach to instructional design begins with knowing the teaching model instructors use in their disciplinary areas, such as the jurisprudential model for teaching law and the process oriented guided inquiry model used in STEM courses (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). Because disciplinary areas also use different models of thinking, I want to understand what model an instructor uses, or would like to use.
When instructors use the teaching and thinking models unique to their disciplines, they provide their students with learning experiences that possess greater fidelity to the real-world context. Dr. Leslie Briggs helped me to think about this relationship when he asked me "What do teaching models have to do with models of instructional design?"
With this foothold in context of an instructor's discipline, instructors can usually articulate what counts as significant learning in their courses. From there, the learning outcomes allow us to use research findings to flesh out explicit strategies for learning. We begin with an instructional analysis of outcomes and then align the strategies with the levels of learning as we discuss the following issues.
Models of teaching and thinking
Identify the models and elaborate on the implications for design of instruction. See STEM Professional Academy and Faculty Development Centers and Libraries publications on faculty development.
Student entry knowledge and skills
Identify students' entry-level knowledge and skills, comfort and familiarity with technology, what might predispose them to shortcuts such as mosaic plagiarism, or other variables relevant to learning process. Kalyuga's work on the expertise reversal effect reminds us of the need to identify what students know, their skills, and their thinking models. Confidence or knowledge surveys, pretests, and student questionnaires can help with this analysis. See Adding Confidence to Knowledge publication.
Presentation design
Choose presentation designs that fit the discipline, student capabilities, and instructor preferences. Use effective design elements of organization, layout, images, and media. Make it easy for students to locate, and use content. Use regularity of structure to help students connect the "chunks" of what they are learning into organized wholes. See Cognitive Dissonance of Graduate Students research paper.
Attention, relevance and satisfaction
Craft attention in stages. In routine practice, this usually means giving a meaningful short preview to introduce to learners to what's to come and why in order to focus their attention. Then provide continual attention devices such as an overview and questioning strategies (once is not enough). Students pay greater attention to sufficiently challenging (don't make it too easy) but not overly challenging tasks (don't make it too hard). See Using the ARCS-V Motivation Model conference session.
Learning strategies
Choose strategies that fit best with the type of learning targeted in a course, such as verbal information, concepts, rules, problem solving, cognitive strategies, attitudes, or motor skills.
Content presentation
Assure that content is accurate content, contemporary or in an appropriate historical context, and relevant to what the students are studying and to their goals and interests. Challenge students to somehow work with the content and their own experiences to construct meaning. In some courses, learning verbal information may be a very high priority. It may be critical for students to "burn content into their brains" because of the need for rapid and automated retrieval.
Practice or rehearsal
Create opportunities for students to practice targeted capabilities to help the learning, the correction of mistakes, and overlearning of tasks as appropriate for automaticity, efficiency, or accuracy of using what has been learned. Misconceptions are harder to unlearn and will require "deep constructivism" through effort and time for to students to change. They need to see results.
Informative feedback
Set up learning experiences so that students receive informative feedback. They need "informative feedback" to form judgments about how they are doing and what they need to improve or correct if they wish to reach their personal best or their goals in a particular course.
Assessment of performance
Starting with an assessment blueprint aligned to learning outcomes. Use more than one form of assessment. Use rubrics and exemplars to guide the scoring of a performance. To assess the application of problems solving strategies, rules, or concepts, ask students to apply them, not just to recall knowledge of them.
©2020 Ludwika A. Goodson