ECI 617 - Foundations of Instructional Technology: Week of September 29

Accounting for Instructional Strategies and Learning Styles

What is meant by learning styles?

• Issues in Adult Learning
• Gender Tendencies in Learning Styles
• Kolb’s learning styles
  
• Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences

What is Meant by Instructional Strategies?

• Knowledge structure
• Presentation method
• An opportunity to explore the ideas being taught
• Practice with feedback
• Learner guidance

Do Instructional Goals or Learning Styles matter most?

Four individual instructional styles

• Receptive - presentation, no practice
• Directive - definition, examples, nonexamples presented, practice then is given to the student
• Guided Discovery - explore situation to uncover examples and nonexamples. Must have nonexamples and discovery
• Exploratory - best for expert learners

What kinds of learners are found in each category?

• Cognitive-restricted do best in 2
• Cognitive-flexible do best in 3 and 4

Our man says what?

Cognitive Flexibility Theory

• Much of ISD is an unrealistic simplification of learning
• This leads to inability to transfer to novel
• Learning systems must enable content to be addressed in many different ways
• Based upon idea that teaching in structured way inhibits the ability to transfer knowledge to situations that do not match the instructional materials

Problem Solving

The goal of instruction should be to become better problem solvers

What is Problem Solving?

• Problem
  • Involves an unknown
  • Some value in finding that unknown
• Problem solving
  • requires a mental representation of the problem (a problem space)
  • some manipulation of that representation using conscious activity

Three different classes of problems

• Structuredness
• Complexity
• Abstractness (Domain Specificity)

Assignments due October 6

Readings

• Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning - Brown, Collins & Duguid (review)
• Situated Learning from the TIP database
• Instructional Design based upon a Constructivist View - This is a hypertext on the subject. It will be impossible to print out. Follow links until understanding is achieved. This is now a dead link
• Reflections on Constructivism and Instructional Design

Assignments

• Test on Sections 1 and 2 - Test in in BlackBoard with link in Announcements and Course Documents
• Turn in a final version of your instructional design, incorporating changes and directions that have interested you from the readings and class discussions. Submit to Digital Drop Box in Blackboard

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