Instructional Strategies Concept - Research Paper Example

?Running Head: INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES CONCEPT Instructional Strategies Concept Introduction This paper isabout discussing primary challenges faced by an instruction designer during instruction development process with reference to the Denny Clifford case study. Denny Clifford is an instructional design consultant who created a large variety of instructional materials. He agreed to work with Dr. Cynthia for designing an instructional material with a list of suggestions and delivery method of the same. However, according to the study, Clifford, the experienced instruction designer found Dr. Cynthia to be his toughest client in his career. He faced a number of difficulties in designing the material and till date he has not been able to complete any normal ID task of his (Ertmer and Cennamo, n.d.). Challenges faced by the instructional designers Clifford lacked the essential data of learner’s characteristics, which is the most important information an instruction designer needs to develop the pattern of instruction (Ertmer and Cennamo, n.d.). Most designers put stress on learners and learning outcomes prior to the designing of instruction. The learning process complexities and several critical human dimensions are required to be understood by designers which come into play. Learners carry a wealth of experiences and traits with them to a training setting or education that play a significant part in measuring the success of the instruction. It also includes normal profile factors that tell about the learners’ background, capability and several attitudinal factors. Many of these factors have notable impacts on the learners’ motivation to learn. A basket of prerequisite skills and knowledge are also brought by the learners to the instructional setting. These entry skills are highly related to the content of a particular instructional experience (Richey, James, Klein, and Tracey, 2010. p.170). The second problem faced by Clifford was regarding contextual analysis. In spite of having four meetings with Oakes, Clifford could not gather the necessary important information that could help him during contextual analysis (Ertmer and Cennamo, n.d.). Contextual analysis plays a key role in designing and developing instructions for learning. Instructional context provides rich data about real world scenario and examples. There are few reasons that necessitate analysis of context. First, every aspect of the leaning experiences is influenced by context. Second, Context as a collection of factors can facilitate or inhibit instruction and learning. Third, multiple contexts can be required a by single classroom. For example, sixth grade students might need to do survey in neighboring historical buildings, do research in computer lab and in historic society and arrange a meeting in a hallway in a problem based learning approach. An instructional designer should analyze three types of contexts. They are orienting context where learner is focused primarily, instructional context that suggests about the scheduling and physical environment of the training and another is transfer context, which enables the opportunities for transferring the skills and knowledge to new situations (Morrison, Ross, Kalman, and Kemp, 2011, pp.65-66). Although Clifford did have his notes and resources from the four meetings with Oaks, but it just did seem remotely related to his assignment (Ertmer and Cennamo, n.d.). As a result, he could not create an objective domain. Objective domains are classifications or categories of objectives that helps instructional designers for determining several important elements of design. There are four domains of objective such as, cognitive, affective, psychomotor and interpersonal. These help designers to determine how to structure evaluations, objectives and delivery system. For an example, an instructional designer was working on training system for technicians for repairing a certain type of computer. It might require usage all the four domains. Such as, Cognitive domain: A learner should know about repairing an equipment set. Psychomotor domain: A learner should know how to remove cases physically and use boards in it and should also know about performing skills using the body. Affective domain: A learner should be able to apply various strategies to overcome the negative feelings about fixing certain models (Hodell, 2011, pp.91-92). Three instructional strategies for the case In order to design a successful instruction for the mentioned case study of Denny Clifford, few strategies could be applied. One such instruction is ask the teacher to be a good listener. He should listen to the students’ answers. Instead of pointing them wrong (that is if they are), he should modify their answers to a right application. This method encourages the students to think more about their own ideas and enhance their application skill. Second strategy that could be suggested to the teachers is asking them to create real life situation while teaching a particular topic. Suppose a teacher is teaching why a tree should be kept under the sun for its growth. Here instead of explaining the theoretical logic to the students, the teacher should actually make them observe what happens when a tree is kept under the sun and what happens if it is kept in the dark (this method of teaching is adopted by the schools in UK). Lastly the teachers could be instructed to make questionnaires for the students and ask them to fill up with their own answers. This would help teachers to know students personally and develop some knowledge about the various queries of the students and form the teaching material accordingly. Ways to gather task information from subject matter experts Task analysis is considered to be the tools of knowledge elicitation. Following are the brief descriptions of few knowledge elicitation processes. a) Documentation analysis: It is often termed as the most commonly used knowledge elicitation process. Documentation is consulted by task analysts to gather information about performance standards, procedures, recurrent problems and essential concepts. b) Observation: To gather information about how in normal settings tasks actually perform, task analysis uses observation method. When task analysts want to know what tasks are done by teachers in their classes, they observe the performances of some of the teachers and watch them completing. Observation has been the primary process to acquire data for a long time. c) Survey questionnaire: Survey questionnaire has been the most useful tool to gather data in human resource development and training. For developing process, most procedures start with assessment, task analysis and performance analysis. Each of these analyses need detail information which could be efficiently extracted by survey questionnaire (Jonassen, Tessmer and Hannum, 1999). Rationale for recommendations The strategies suggested above can be rationalized on the basis of participative leadership and necessity of interaction in learning. Otherwise it would become a single directional flow of information or knowledge. Exchange of stories and information can make the class interesting and makes it easy to remember things taught in class instead of having to memorize texts without understanding. References Ertmer, P.A. and K.S. Cennamo, (n.d.) Denny Clifford Case Study 6, Case studies in instructional Design, New Jersey: Prentice Hall Hodell, C. (2011), A No-Nonsense Approach to Industrial Design, USA, ASTD Press Jonassen, D., Tessmer, M., and Hannum, W. H., (1999), Task Analysis Methods for Instructional Design, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Morrison, G.R. Ross, S.M. Kemp, J.E. and Kalman, H. (2011), Designing Effective Instruction, United States Richey, C. R., Klein, J. D., and Tracey, M. W., (2011), The Instructional Design Knowledge Base, New York, Routledge Read More