Instructional Strategies - An Introduction
Background Information
In this course, you will move through the instructional design process. You will define a need that you want to address with instruction, decided on a goal, and break that goal down into steps, substeps, and subskills. In addition, you will analyze your learners, the context where they will learn these new skills, and the context in which they will use these new skills. You will begin by creating a list of objectives indicating what you want them to be able to do at the end of your instruction, along with items that will help you determine whether they can do it or not. When all of these broad planning and analysis steps are finished, you will begin to think about planning individual lessons. This is accomplished by creating an instructional strategy. As you see this is the sixth step in the Dick and Carey model.
Dick and Carey use the term Instructional Strategy to describe the process of sequencing and organizing content, specifying learning activities, and deciding how to deliver the content and activities. An instructional strategy can perform several functions:
- It can be used as a prescription to develop instructional materials.
- It can be used as a set of criteria to evaluate existing materials.
- It can be used as a set of criteria and a prescription to revise existing materials.
- It can be used as a framework from which to plan class lecture notes, interactive group exercises, and homework assignments.
The planning of an instructional strategy is an important part of the overall instructional design process. Gagne calls the planning and analysis steps the "architecture" of the course, while the instructional strategies are the "bricks and mortar". This is where you deal with how to actually instruct the student. Previous steps in the instructional design process have deliberately left out any discussion of how the instruction would be done.
Research on Instructional Strategies
The research in the field of instructional design provides for a research-based framework to design instruction. Review the following links to become familiar with these authors' works. Additional resources from each author and others will be presented each week. Current authors in the field of research-based instructional strategies include the following:
John Hattie's Research on High-Impact Instructional Strategies: http://www.evidencebasedteaching.org.au/hattie-his-high-impact-strategies/
Robert Marzano's Research-based Strategies for Improving Achievement High-Yield Strategies
Jim Knight's Research on High-Impact Instruction http://www.corwin.com/highimpactinstruction/default.htm