Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

20 – Instructional Strategies
– The type of task is also a factor. A common situation
is that learning material needed for answering
multiple-choice questions is different from studying
for long-answer questions.
• “Do I have the time needed to do the task?”
• “For this type of task, what strategies work best for me?”
• “Am I motivated to do the task? If not, what needs to
change?”
• “What related skills do I already know how to do or
need to learn?”
• “How do I know that I have learned the concept?”
• “What did I learn from making that error?”
• “How well am I progressing?”
• “What do I still need to learn?”
• “How well is my plan and learning strategy working?”
• “Should I change my plan and learning strategy?”
• “What could I have done differently?”
• “What should I have done differently?”
• “How can the mental processes I used work for
learning other content?”
PROVIDING FEEDBACK
Your feedback should be positive, constructive, and
immediate. It should provide complete information as
to why their answer and other possibilities are right or
wrong, and/or guide students towards attaining the
learning outcome. Detailed feedback is important to
ensure understanding, especially if the learner’s answer
was simply a guess or if the learner’s answer was correct
but the reasoning was wrong. This event is coordinated
with eliciting the performance.
ASSESSING PERFORMANCE
Students are tested in this event. This step is basically
more formal than the “elicit the performance” event. As
much as possible, the tests you create should approximate
real situations. Test all learning outcomes and only
the learning outcomes. Tests should be criterionreferenced
(that is, performance based on achieving the
specified learning outcomes).
You should provide the students with their test results
as soon as possible. The feedback you provide should
pinpoint areas in which the student had difficulties.
ENHANCING RETENTION AND TRANSFER
In this event, ensure students retain the information and
that the information can be transferred beyond the specific
ideas presented in the lesson. More exposure leads
to more retention. You can increase retention through
questioning, giving reviews, paraphrasing, and providing
summaries. Retention activities should occur at
spaced intervals and occur before more complex skills
are learned.
Tip
Increase retention by exposing the learner to the
material in a variety of ways.
You can facilitate transfer by providing links to related
situations, related information, or novel problems
and solutions. If possible, transfer should focus on realworld
situations.
Develop and select instructional
materials
Based on the instructional strategy for each learning
outcome, and information from the other steps of the
instructional design process, you need to determine
whether materials should be gathered or developed. The
main reason for using existing materials (those owned by
your institution or purchased) is to save time and money.
GATHER EXISTING MATERIAL
Some but likely not all of the needed material may exist.
Potential resources can be found in learning-object repositories,
other Internet resources such as Wikipedia,
and on DVD-ROMs. Learning-object repositories may
be found within your institution or at provincial/state,
national, and international sites. Compare any existing
material to the instructional strategy. Determine
whether it is suitable and cost-effective. You may prefer
existing materials if the content you would develop will
be obsolete before or soon after you complete it. You
may have to deal with the “if we didn’t make it, it can’t
be any good” syndrome.
Determine whether the existing material can be
adapted or supplemented. One alternative is to get permission
to repurpose existing materials for your own
needs. Remember, if you include work done by others,
you may not have permission to earn money from your
product. However, you may be able to work out a revenue-sharing
agreement.
Note that not all copyrights will be cleared, and some
promised materials might not be provided.
Remember to check all digital materials for viruses.
316 Education for a Digital World