9 – Instructional Design

Some ot the conclusions regarding cognitive development expressed earlier in this book may be recalled as a prelude to considering an instructional design. The instructional design is intended for use by teachers and other persons when preparing materials to teach concepts, and by teachers to guide their instructional practices. One principle central to the design of instruction is that children and youth attain the four levels of the same concepts in an invariant sequence. Closely related to this principle is the generalization that concepts attained only at the concrete and identity levels cannot be used in understanding principles, in understanding taxonomic relations, or in solving problems. Attainment at the formal level, in comparison to the classificatory, greatly facilitates the use of a concept. What do these principles imply for instructional design? Instructional materials should be designed that enable students to attain the successive levels of individual concepts and related groups of concepts and also to use the concepts in the three ways indicated. A second generalization: The levels and the uses of different concepts, the understanding of related principles and taxonomies, and the acquisition of problem-solving skills that involve the concept are mastered by students at different ages. Concepts such as cutting tool and tree, which have examples that are directly observable as objects in the environment, are attained earlier than are concepts such as noun, whose examples are words or other symbols that stand for individual objects, persons, events, processes, relations, and qualities, or classes of them. Developers of instructional materials, as well as teachers, may be able to profit from the study of a design that takes this knowledge into account. Intraindividuality in patterns of cognitive development is related to the subject fields in which knowledge is organized, including language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. Most students as individuals do not acquire knowledge in these different areas at the same rate. Intraindividual variability in cognitive functioning is an important variable to consider in a design for instruction. Interindividual differences in the rate of attaining concepts, in understanding principles and taxonomic relations, and in solving problems are exceedingly large. Some school children at age 9 are more advanced in these dimensions of cognitive functioning than are some high school seniors at age 18. The differences are so large that any single piece of instructional material, such as a film, filmstrip, or chapter of a book, cannot possibly be used effectively with an unselected group of students of the same chronological age. Any oral interactive instruction designed to teach the same content to an unselected group of 25–40 students also will surely fail with some of the students. Instruction can be designed to provide for interindividual differences in rate of development. Three kinds of analyses are carried out as part of the instructional design reported in this chapter. Acontent analysis is performed to identify the information or substance related to the concepts that will be taught. A behavioral analysis identifies the behaviors, operations, or skills that students must demonstrate in order to learn the substance. An instructional analysis identifies the instructional principles that may be followed in attaining the desired objectives. The first two analyses were performed on the concepts used in the longitudinal study and also in the controlled experiments in school settings that are reported in this chapter.