Instructional Strategies and Design Document Assignment

Designing your instructional strategies can be a creative part of the instructional design process. It is often useful to come up with new and unusual ways of presenting materials and helping students interact with it. At the same, this creative portion must be done within a framework that ensures that the strategy includes all of the important elements that we know can enhance student learning.

For better or worse, there are many ways to do that, and different ID theorists and practitioners have different recommendations. In particular, the Dick, Carey, and Carey book and the Morrison, Ross, and Kemp book take different approaches to the question. Here I will try to reconcile them both with the assignment given in this class.

The Design Document (or Instructional Strategies) assignment asks you to design the instruction before you actually develop the materials. I think of an instructional designer as being similar to an architect, who wants to have the entire design in a blueprint before going ahead and building the structure. For a small project like the one in this class, the design step may seem superfluous; in fact, it may look a bit like a lesson plan. But it is more important in large projects, such as whole courses. That’s why I want you to do it here.

The assignment is best done by including the following information:

An overview of the strategies that you will use, to serve as an advance organizer for the reader. This should include your media choices.

An indication of how the objectives you are teaching will be clustered. That is, it is rare nowadays to try to teach each objective separately, although that was a tactic of the early behaviorists when they developed “programmed instruction.” More likely, you will now teach a group of objectives at one time, such as all the steps involved in copying and pasting text from one document to another in a word processor.

An indication of how these clusters of objectives will be sequenced. Which comes first, second, third in the instruction? Why? What strategy did you use for sequencing: chronological order, backward chaining, simple-to-complex, or something else?

Next, a table showing, for EACH cluster of objectives, how you will apply Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction. These events include the following and represent the minimum number of things that have to be done to help people learn:

1. Gain the learner’s attention
2. Inform the learner of the objective
3. Stimulate recall of prerequisite knowledge
4. Present stimuli (text, graphics, other media)
5. Provide learner guidance
6. Elicit performance
7. Give feedback
8. Assess performance
9. Enhance retention and transfer

The Dick, Carey, and Carey book has a table with a slightly different and longer list, but the ideas are very similar. In either case, the goal in the design document is to explain briefly how you intend to ensure that each of these “events” occurs in your instruction.

Finally, apply the ARCS model of motivation to your project by showing where in your Nine Events table you have allowed for Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction.

The Morrison, Ross, and Kemp book approaches the issue a little differently. Let’s take a quick look:

Chapter 6 Designing the Instruction: Sequencing

Starting with sequencing, the authors describe several fundamental strategies for deciding the order in which to teach objectives:

• Gagne’s Prerequisite method
• Posner and Strike’s method based on learning-related, world-related, and concept-related content
• Reigeluth’s elaboration theory

You can read the details in the book.

Chapter 7 Designing the Instruction: Strategies

This chapter discusses various strategies for teaching and how to develop them. They specifically stress generative strategies, based on cognitive psychology, over older, more didactic strategies.

Key parts of this chapter discuss prescriptions for teaching different types of learning objectives. If you will recall, in the Analysis Phase (either Needs Assessment or Instructional/Task Analysis) you were asked to label the types of learning involved in your project. This is where that task becomes relevant. Again, read the book for details.

Chapters 6 and 7 relate most closely to the early parts of the assignment, with 7 moving into the table described above.

Chapter 8 Designing the Instructional Message

This chapter provides a bridge between the Design and the Materials Development phases, since it impacts on both. Parts of it relate directly to the table described above. Other parts are important for actually writing and laying out the materials.