This document discusses best practices for giving instructions to students, particularly those with special needs. It emphasizes that instructions should be explicit, clear, simple, and given in "bite-sized chunks". It also stresses the importance of having students repeat back instructions to ensure understanding, giving both written and verbal instructions, and repeating instructions multiple times. Chunking instructions into smaller pieces and having students tell or show what they are supposed to do helps reduce confusion and frustration for students with special needs. Overall, the document provides guidance on structuring instructions in a way that makes them easiest for all students to understand.

1. By: Diego Lopez
EDSC-310
Ensuring Students Understand Instructions

2. *Giving instructions is critical*
A Teacher’s skill at giving
instructions impacts the students’
academic lives

3. Giving Good Instructions
 Instructions should be explicit rather than implicit
 Instructions should be worded clearly
 Instructions should be worded simply
 Subtle shifts in wording can produce significant
differences
 Instructors should have learners repeat back
instructions to ensure understanding

4. Making it Simple to Understand
 Make instructions concrete
 List materials needed
 List the steps to be followed so
students can mentally check them
off; do not use paragraph form
 Give multiple representations of
directions; written and verbal,
pictorial and diagrammatical, a
demonstration of exemplary
exemplars (examples of outstanding
work)
 When multiple steps are involved,
give instructions in “bite-sized
chunks”
 Have students complete several
steps before discussing the results
and then present the next set of
instructions

5. Unlocking the Doors
 The poor metacognition
of students with ELN is
one of the hallmarks of
cognition disabilities,
one of the locks on the
doors to learning
 We need to ensure that
we scaffold them by
helping them focus their
attention on us while we
give directions

6. Pay Attention
 Executive attention – refers to
the ability to willfully inhibit
attention from being drawn to
irrelevant stimuli
 Selective attention – refers to
being able to focus attention on
relevant stimuli while screening
out the irrelevant
 Sustained attention –
Maintaining attention over a
prolonged period of time in
order to detect infrequent
signals
 Orienting attention – refers to
the ability to direct attention to a
specified location and
reorienting to a new location

7. Time to Focus
 Sluggish Attentional Shifting Hypothesis –
The hypothesis that people with dyslexia
have difficulty with orientation of attention
 Two-Cue System – We teach students from
the first day that the signal for getting quiet
and attending is raising our hand at the front
of the room. The first student who notices us
with our hand raised immediately stops
talking and raises his or her hand. Other
students quickly notice, stop talking, and
raise their hands
 When we get ready to give instructions, we
use instruction cue. We point to our eyes,
and then our ears, and finally the middle of
our chest while saying the chant, “Eyes and
ears on me.” We say the chant three times to
ensure that everyone has processed it. Only
when we have everyone’s eyes do we give
instructions

8. Help Us Learn to Give Directions
Better
 Giving directions = Procedural discourse
 Poor instructions are ubiquitous
 Processing difficulties are a hallmark of cognitive disabilities-effective,
efficient, and economic- poor auditory perception needs written
directions. Poor visual needs oral directions
 Written directions must be read out loud to the class. When directions
are oral the teacher has to write them down
 Revise and simplify the directions. Hand out copies of the directions
 Oral directions have an initial advantage, where as the written
directions had an advantage over time
 Providing oral and written instructions helps students with ELN
succeed because: perception improves with multicoding of
information, confusion is eliminated when perception is supported,
sequencing is facilitated when students see and hear instructions,
frustration is reduced when students know what to do

9. Repeat it Over and Over Again
 Repetition/Repetition Priming – Priming increases the
brain’s ability to attend to and learn new material while
reducing the cognitive load. Repetition sharpens the
brain’s ability to recognize a word in subsequent
presentations. (Auditory Cortex)
 Repetitious instructions provided benefits as compared to
non-repetitious instructions, crediting the natural function
of inherent redundancy
 Word identification study for adolescents with dyslexia
and without showed that repetition produced a facilitative
effect on both reaction time and accuracy for both sets of
participants. Researchers call the increase in activation
under such conditions latent functionality and note that
repetition is one of the factors that will increase activation
in the brains of people with dyslexia
 Multiple-response procedure is more effective than single-
response procedure
 Students with ELN have a biological neurological basis for
their disabilities. Denying them simple accommodations
that would assist them is illogical
 Repeating directions is an effective key for increasing
students’ ability to carry out assignments correctly because
sequencing is facilitated when students have more than
one opportunity to listen to steps of an assignment,
confusion is eliminated when students are repeatedly
exposed to directions, memory is enhanced by multiple
exposures, and frustration is reduced when confusion is
eliminated

10. Effective Chunking
 Chunking – a strategy specifically recommended as
a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) strategy by
the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST)
was initially studied in chess
 Chunking means to combine small, meaningful
units of information
 The benefit of chunking is derived from the
learner’s reduced memory load when compared to
a condition in which she or he doesn’t chunk.
Instead of remembering one long string of
information, the learner needs only to remember
several short strings
 Chunking produced a slight improvement for ninth
graders. Chunking instructions facilitated fifth-
graders’ performance in all dependent measures
 Chunking makes instructions easier to remember
by reducing the memory load
 Chunking of instructions is a successful inclusion
strategy because confusion is eliminated when
students are not overwhelmed with input, memory
is enhanced when smaller numbers of items must
be remembered, and frustration is decreased when
students know exactly what to do

11. It is Biological
 In a landmark study, Keenan,
Betjamann, Wadsworth, Defris, and
Olson (2006) investigated the genetic
contribution to listening
comprehension.
 The results showed that the fraternal
twins differed from the identical twins in
highly statistically significant ways;
unlike the fraternal twins, if one
identical twin had poor listening
comprehension, the other twin was
highly likely to also to have poor
listening comprehension. The results
clearly demonstrated that word-reading
and listening comprehension are both
genetically determined
 Students with ELN often have a difficulty
with verbal comprehension for what are
clearly biological reasons

12. No more Confusion
 Tell-Backs and Show-Mes – We never ask,
“Do you understand what you are supposed
to do?”
 We always repeat directions three times
while we have students look directly at us
 We then ask several students, including one
with ELN, “Tell me what you are supposed to
do”, or, “Show me what you are supposed to
do.”
 Blaming the victim is counterproductive.
What we need to do is stop asking, “Do you
understand?”
 Tell-Backs and Show-Mes are good inclusion
strategies because confusion is eliminated
when students know exactly what to do,
memory is enhanced when students repeat
back or demonstrate instructions,
Metacognition is increased when students
know that they know what to do, and
Frustration is eliminated when confusion is
eliminated