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How do you build an instructional-design theory?

Reigeluth (1938, p. 30-31) includes a section on how to build an instructional design theory that contains four steps which roughly correspond to Snow's different levels of theory (1971). Reigeluth's steps are:

"1) Develop formative hypotheses about instructional design on the basis of data, experience, intuition, and/or logic. These hypotheses may be fairly narrow and local (the start of a basically inductive---or bottom up---approach to theory construction) or fairly broad and comprehensive (the start of a basically deductive---or top-down---approach to theory construction).

"2) Develop a taxonomy of variables related to instrucitonal design...identifying, describing, and classifying variables that may be of importance to instructional-design theory.

"3) Derive principles of instructional design. These principles usually describe cause-and-effect relationships among the variables identified in stage 2, and many of them are derived from the formative hypotheses developed in stage 1. This stage relies heavily on experience, intuition, and logic for postulating the principles and on empirical research for testing them.

"4) Develop models and theories of instructional design.

"The just-described stages are not followed in strictly linear fashion. Rather, it is an interactive process entailing much recycling through the stages and much simultaneous activity on different stages...it would be very rare to find either a purely inductive or purely deductive approach to theory construction."
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