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ITec 47403/57403
Instructional Design
Examples of Final Examination Questions
For each of the following situations, decide
whether the problem described is likely to be solved
with instruction. If it is, put an I on the
line next to it. If it is not, put an N on the
line next to it. If the situation is ambiguous, you
may explain your response briefly. A good explanation
will cancel out an incorrect response. (10 points)
____ Students in wood shop often remove a
variety of tools from storage during a typical
class period. Although they are given time at the
end of the period to put things away, most
students simply keep working until the bell and
then bolt out the door. The tools are left lying
about and usually the teacher puts them away.
____ Your company has instituted a new
performance review system for employees. However,
it has so far led to a variety of complaints by
managers and, especially, employees being
reviewed. Managers were trained on the system,
especially on its importance to the company. The
system uses procedures, vocabulary, and rating
scales that are very different from the old
system.
____ Sales clerks in a computer and software
discount store are currently hired primarily for
their personalities (and willingness to work for
what the store pays). They are taught to greet
customers, express willingness to help, and so
forth. However, they often cannot find the
products that customers ask for and usually refer
specific questions about how things work, etc. to
either a manager or the technicians in the back
room. Sometimes they try to sell customer a
different product than that asked for, with the
explanation that "it’s just as
good." Management believes that a
significant number of customers are leaving the
store and buying from competitors.
____ Students at a suburban high school vary
widely in their participation in extracurricular
activities. In general, the same groups of
students seem to show up for most of the
activities: band, plays, athletics, and so on.
Obviously, there are variations that depend on
individual talents and so on, but there is
clearly a large group of students who rarely
participate in anything. If they do show up and
try out for an activity, they are often not
picked or don’t fit in well with the usual
crowd. The administration and many teachers would
like to expand participation in extracurricular
activities.
____ Proficiency test scores at an local
elementary school have not measured up to
expectations. Especially in math, these students
just don’t do well on these tests. The
principal is convinced that the cause lies in
motivational problems and test anxiety.
Please label each of the following situations as
an example of Formative (F) or Summative (S)
evaluation. (8 points)
____ A fourth grade teacher now has several
SchoolNet+ computers in her room and she teaches
her students to use the World Wide Web to search
for information for a small research paper. She
compares the papers produced by last year’s
class to those of this year’s
"Webbed" class to find out whether
having the Web improves them.
____ A company is considering buying an
extensive multimedia training program on sales
skills for its sales reps but insists on first
seeing data about its effectiveness and
appropriateness for this audience.
____ Every five years a graduate program in
Instructional Technology surveys its graduates to
find out whether the skills they learned have
been useful in their careers. They use the data
for such purposes as justifying their program to
the administration, arguing for hiring more
faculty, and so forth.
____ A middle school teacher is always looking
for new ways of teaching and motivating the kids.
This year she tried several new things. At
regular intervals she had students fill out
questionnaires, and she kept extensive records of
student performance. Now it is late summer and
she is planning to get started teaching again in
the fall. She reviews all this data with an eye
toward improving her classes in the coming year.
You have been assigned to develop teaching
materials for a basic college math course for
beginning undergraduate students at a small and
progressive liberal arts college. The material that
must be taught is primarily intellectual skills, from
basic defined concepts through rules and principles
to fairly high level problem solving skills. It has
been well and clearly analyzed so that the math
department agrees that all of the subordinate skills
and concepts are present and well-defined. The
students are generally pretty good: above average in
intelligence and motivation for college. However,
they do tend to be liberal arts majors who have some
math anxiety and even math hostility. You have been
told that the instructional strategies you should use
in your materials should emphasize both "the
basics" and the problem solving skills. What you
haven’t been told is what media you can use for
these materials. Describe a set of two or more
instructional media that you think would be effective
in this situation. If you think it will help, explain
your answer. (6 points)
Interactive multimedia is the combination of
computer-based instruction, video, audio, graphics,
and other media in one package. As an instructional
technology it has advantages and disadvantages.
Certainly the combination of media can present
stimuli to students that are difficult to present in
any other way. At the same time, these programs can
be very expensive to develop, and computers remain
quite limited in what kinds of responses that they
can accept from a student. Basically, a student can
choose things (like the answers to multiple choice
questions), point and click on things, or type in
short answers (words, numbers, phrases). Anything
more complicated can’t be understood by most
programs.
Given the immense potential of multimedia
instruction, as well as its current limitations,
describe a learning domain (subject matter) and
learning population where interactive multimedia
instruction would probably be worth the time, effort,
and cost. (15 points)
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