Complete thesis - Murdoch University

opportunistic and eclectic nature of practitioner-centered (or problem-centred) instructiondevelopment. They suggests that consistent theoretical grounding is only possible or desirablewhere participants share a common ideology: even then, resulting instructional design islikely to be a compromise reflecting the diversity of participants and stakeholders. Despitethis caveat, the point Hannafin (1997) makes, that the designers goal is to understand thecontexts of the learning environment (eg, is performance accuracy and training efficiency thegoal, or does the discipline require critical thinking and creativity) well enough to grounddesign practice using complementary foundations, is very relevant.Describing educational practice Sfard (1998, p 11) notes theoretical exclusivity and didacticsingle-mindedness can be trusted to make even the best of educational ideas fail. What isworse, however, is a mismatch, not between the instructional design and its grounding, buta lack of coincidence between the actuality of practice in the discipline and the instructionaldesign it is supposed to model. Reigeluth (1996, 1997) argues that the current paradigmof education is based on standardisation, conformity and compliance, geared to the massproduction of industrial age manufacture. This does not equate with the needs of the late20th and 21st century job market which revolves around problem-solving, teamwork, communications,initiative taking and diverse perspectives. He suggests a new paradigm is needed– based on customisation, diversity and initiative, to suit the needs of the information-ageeconomy.Barbour (2005, p 32) concurs:it seems reasonable to expect, at the end of a tertiary education experience, thatevery student’s attention should have been focussed on all of the themes identifiedin discipline and level specific contexts.He maintains that domain competence includes metaknowledge (knowledge about how knowledgeand practice is organised, conveyed, advanced, and legitimated) of the specific culturalethos of the discipline. Of the elements of his taxonomy relevant to undergraduate education,he suggests the following enable acculturation [with discipline specific elements only extracted]:Level 4 (tertiary entry – ages 16+) metaknowledge about using terms and specialistvocabulary• a vocabulary of 500 discipline specific words related to discourse in target disciplinesand a vocabulary of 836 academic words (Nation and Waring, 1997)• demonstrated fluency in using the vocabulary in literary and verbal context suchas is required for engaging in simple discourse157