Chapter 8 Presentation

1. Ch. 8 Developing An
Instructional Strategy
Presentation By: Ezra Gray

2. Background
This chapter addresses the ways an instructional designers identifies how instruction
engages learners. The term Instructional Strategy suggests a huge variety of
teaching/learning activities, such as group discussions, independent reading, case studies,
lectures, computer simulations, worksheets, and cooperative group projects. These are
essentially microstrategies, pieces of an overall macrostrategy that must take learners from a
motivational introduction to a topic through learners’ mastery of the objectives. A well-
designed set of instructional materials contains many of the strategies or procedures that a
good teacher might typically use with a group of learners. When designing instruction, it is
necessary to develop an instructional strategy that uses, to the degree possible, the
knowledge we have about facilitating the learning process.

3. Objectives
● Name the five learning components of an instructional strategy and list the primary
considerations within each.
● Plan the learning components of an instructional strategy, including preinstructional
activities, content presentation and learning guidance, learner participation,
assessment, and follow-through activities.
● Specify learning components congruent with learners’ maturity and ability levels.
● Tailor learning components for the type of learning outcome.

4. Learning Components of Instructional
Strategies
An instructional strategy describes the general components of a set of instructional materials
and procedures used with those materials to enable student mastery of learning outcomes.
Note that an instructional strategy is more than a simple outline of the content presented to
the learner. The concept of an instructional strategy originated with the events of instruction
described in cognitive psychologist R. M. Gagne’s Conditions of Learning, in which he defines
nine events that represent external instructional activities that support internal mental
processes of learning.

5. Gangne’s Nine Conditions of Learning
1. Gaining attention
2. Informing learner of the objective
3. Stimulating recall of prerequisite
learning
4. Presenting the stimulus material
5. Providing learning guidance
6.) Eliciting the performance
7.) Providing feedback about performance
correctness
8.) Assessing the performance
9.) Enhancing retention and transfer

6. Motivating Learners
One of the typical criticisms of instruction is
its lack of interest and appeal to the learner.
One instructional designer who attempts to
deal with this problem in a systematic way
is John Keller, who developed the ARCS
model based on his review of the
psychological literature on motivation. The
four parts of his model are Attention,
Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction. To
produce instruction that motivates the
learner, these four attributes of the
instruction must be considered throughout
the design of the instructional strategy.

7. Content Presentation and Learner
Guidance
The next step to determine exactly what information, concepts, rules, and principles must be
presented to the learner. Content presentation usually follows one of two general patterns:
deductive or inductive. In the deductive pattern, a textbook, an instructor, or mediated
materials show the learner how to distinguish the pieces of new learning and the structural
relationships among the pieces to put them all together into a coherent whole. The inductive
pattern is most associated with discovery learning, in which students are guided, or guide
themselves, through experiences in which they glean the pieces of new learning and the
structural relationships needed to build the coherent whole. If we consider those in our lives
whom we consider to be good teachers, we can usually see how they were able to blend
both deductive and inductive patterns in their instruction.

8. Learner Participation
Practice with feedback is one of the most powerful components in the learning process. You
can enhance the learning process greatly by providing learners with activities that are
directly relevant to the objectives, giving learners an opportunity to practice what you want
them to be able to do. One approach is to embed practice tests into the instruction. The more
common approach is to provide informal opportunities within the instruction for students to
“try out” what they are learning at the time that they are learning it. Not only should learners
be able to practice, but they should also be provided feedback or information about their
performance. Feedback is sometimes referred to as knowledge of results.

9. Assessment
First, you know that you will be using
practice tests of some sort either more or
less formal, as part of the learner
participation component of your instruction;
then you must decide the following: Should
I test entry skills? When should the
assessment be administered? Should I have
a pretest over the skills to be taught? When
should it be administered? Exactly what
skills should be assessed? When or how
should I administer the posttest? Should I
question learners’ attitudes of the
instruction?

10. Assessment (contd.)
A careful distinction must be made here between developing draft materials in preparation
for formative evaluation and producing materials in their final form after formative evaluation
and revision. The draft form of your instruction developed at this stage may be “test heavy”
because you want to be able to locate missing entry skills and track student performance
carefully to pinpoint ineffective sequences in the instruction. In addition to the formal testing
already described, the designer may want to consider using embedded attitude questions,
which indicate learners’ opinions of the instruction at the time that they encountered it.
These attitude or opinion questions can be located directly in self-paced instruction or
included in unit guides. Later, after formative evaluation and revision, the embedded attitude
questions would probably be removed from the instruction, and the overall testing strategy
would become “learner”.

11. Memory Skills
Consider what learners must recall from
memory while performing the instructional
goal. Is there anything that must absolutely
be retrieved from memory? Must it be done
rapidly and without prompts or reference
materials? If so, then many of the
techniques suggested later in the chapter
for teaching verbal information are critical
for inclusion in the instructional strategy.

12. Memory Skills (contd.)
Often the answer to the question of what
learners must remember is that
memorization is not critical, just as long as
they carry out the skill successfully. If this is
the case with your goal, then you might
want to consider the use of a job aid, which
is any device used by the performers to
reduce their reliance on their memory to
perform a task.

13. Transfer of Learning
The second question to ask about your instructional goal is, “What is the nature of the
transfer of learning that must take place?” That is, “How different is the performance context
from the learning context?” Research indicates that, in general, learners transfer only some of
what they learn to new contexts. Learning trends to be situation-specific. Therefore, the
designer must be aware of the tendency of learning not transferring and must use every
means possible to counter this tendency. In addition to making the training and performance
as similar as possible, it is also very helpful to require learners to develop a plan that
indicates how they will use their new skills in the performance context.

14. Theoretical Considerations
A theoretical difference pervading
comparisons of cognitive and constructivist
views is rooted in the roles of content and
the learner. The cognitive assumption is
that the content drives the system, whereas
the learner is the driving factor in
constructivism. The former focuses more on
performance and outcomes, whereas the
latter focuses more on process.

15. Preinstructional Activities
Designing preinstructional activities is also
important for attitudes. Similar to
psychomotor skills, motivation for acquiring
an attitude may be best accomplished
through firsthand observation by the
learners, or through active participation in
simulations, through role playing, or
through video or multimedia vignettes.

16. Presentation Activities
The content and example portion of the
strategy should be delivered by someone or
an imaginary character who is respected
and admired by the learners. This human
model should display the behaviors
involved in the attitude and indicate why
this attitude is appropriate. If possible, it
should be obvious to the learner that the
model is being rewarded or takes personal
satisfaction in displaying this attitude.

17. Designing Constructivist Learning
Environments
Five theory-based goals of all CLEs were described in the section on theoretical
considerations. The five goals can be viewed as a set of minimum specifications or
requirements for designing CLEs. The goal of reasoning-that is, critical thinking- and problem
solving is best supported by planning CLEs that are complex, relevant, and realistic.
Complexity is required in the problem scenarios used in CLEs if students are to transfer
learning experiences to life experiences; however, the range of complexity available within
the problem must challenge students of different achievement and ability without inducing
undue frustration. The CLE must situate students in a realistic and relevant problem scenario.
Situated learning requires a context with which students can identify for motivation and
transfer. The context should include realistic elements of the physical, social, and cultural
world in which the students operate, but need not be “the real world”.

18. Designing Constructivist Learning
Environments (contd.)
Learning can be situated effectively in such contexts as play-acted fairy tales, mock court
trials, computer simulations, serious games, or computer based micro worlds. A problem
scenario should be relevant on two levels. First, problem scenarios must be planned such
that students are able to discern pattern and structure in the problem through their inquiry
process; otherwise, the problem has little relevance to the desired learning of reasoning and
critical-thinking skills. The second level of relevance is in the generalizability in the problem-
solving process and strategies that are being learned. Odd, one of a kind problems may be
interesting and instructive in some ways, but essentially irrelevant for the desired transfer to
applying and practicing problem-solving strategies in a variety of unencountered
circumstances.

19. Summary
Materials you need to develop your instructional strategy include the instructional goal, the
learner and context analyses, the instructional analysis, the performance objectives, and the
assessment items. The instructional strategy is a prescription used for developing or
selecting instructional materials. In creating each component of your strategy, you should
consider the characteristics of your target students-their needs, interests, and experiences-
as well as information about how to gain and maintain their attention throughout the five
learning components of instruction. Keller’s ARCS model provides a handy structure for
considering how to design materials that motivate students to learn.

20. The End
Contact Email: Ezragray7@gmail.com