Skip to main content

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."

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learning Environment

The learning environment can be one or both of the following: 1) Content providing: e.g. other skiers provide good and bad examples, mountain provides visual input to understand skiing (compared to talking about skiiing in a classroom, chalkboard drawings, pictures, video, etc...) 2) Performance enabling: e.g. the mountain, snow, a ski lift, provide a place to ski; skis, boots and poles provide equipment to ski. e.g. a harness can help a diver safely learn a new dive, e.g. a foam pit can help a gymnast safely learn a new move
Post a Comment
Read more

Trait vs state

"A useful distinction in the discussion of student characteristics is trait versus state. Traits are student characteristics that are relatively constant over time...whereas states are student characteristics that tend to vary during individual learning experiences, such as level of content-specific knowledge." (Reigeluth, 1983, p. 32) Reigeluth also states that "many strategy components have been shown to help students with all kinds of traits to learn" [p. 32]. My position is that we do not know a priori which aspects of our instructional strategies, learning environment, motivator, etc... will generalize across many or all students. However, with a localized learning theory we can learn over time which do and which do not. At the same time, we will likely find ways of grouping students that we never would have before imagined.
Post a Comment
Read more

James Paul Gee's 36 principls of learning from What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

In his book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy , James Paul Gee identifies 36 principles of learning: Active, Critical Learning principle All aspects of the learning environment (including the ways in which the semiotic domain is designed and presented) are set up to encourage active and critical, not passive, learning. Design Principle Learning about and coming to appreciate design and design principles is core to the learning experience. Semiotic Principle Learning about and coming to appreciate interrelations within and across multiple sign systems (images, words, actions, symbols, artifacts, etc) as a complex system is core to the learning experience. Semiotic Domains Principle Learning involves mastering, at some level, semiotic domains, and being able to participate, at some level, in the affinity group or groups connected to them. Metalevel Thinking about Semiotic Domains Principle Learning involves active and cr...
Post a Comment
Read more