Chapter 4 Instructional Analysis

Chapter 4 Objectives

Describe the stable and changing similarities and difference among learners . Describe the categories of cognitive characteristics that should be considered in designing instruction.  Describe the difference between general characteristics and specific prior knowledge of a learner population.  Describe some instructional strategy variables that may be influenced by learner characteristics and explain how different learner characteristics may influence how the variables are implemented.  Describe sources of information about learner characteristics of a particular audience.  When given a description of a situation, list questions regarding learner characteristics that you would wish to know before designing instruction, as well as techniques and procedures you would use to find the questions.  Determine whether a particular learner characteristic should be relevant to a particular learning task. 

Describe the stable and changing similarities and differences among learners.

The result of considering similarities and differences among people, along with changing and stable characteristics, is a matrix of four categories of human characteristics. 1. Stable Similarities: similarities among people that are relatively unchanging over time. 2. Stable differences: differences among people that are relatively unchanging over time. 3. Changing similarities: similarities among people that change over time. 4. Changing differences: differences among people that change over time. 

Stable Similarities

Classical or Pavlovian conditioning consists of a stimulus substitution (Hilgard & Bower, 1965)Sensory capacities is a useful stable similarity. 

The limits imposed by information-processing  characteristics are real, and they are commonplace source of learning problems in schools and training settings. Information overload, confusion, and inability to keep with material being presented are typical student learning problems caused by ignoring human information-processing characteristics. 

How to help Information Processing

 Remembering isolated, non meaningful bits information can be made easier by chunking individual units into groups, with each group of bits becoming a single set of information.

Conditions of Learning

Gagne pointed out that once we know that a person is going to learn, for example, a concept, we know that certain conditions need to exist to make it possible for learning to take place. The conditions of learning do not very between people or subjects, the same psychological conditions for learning a concept in mathematics are the same for learning grammar. The similiarity in the conditions for attainment of different learning types of learning is a fundamental building block for instructional design. (Ragan & Smith 2003) 

Stable Differences

A number of factors that are relatively stable over time vary among individual learners. Aptitudes, styles, traits and group membership factors such as gender and ethnicity are all areas in which individuals differ from one another in ways that change little with the years. Aptitudes, Styles, Traits and Group membership factors (gender and ethnicity)