Instructional Design Week Four
Classifying your Instructional Goal and Identifying Subordinate Skills

This Week September 22, 2014

This week, we'll:

• Classify your instructional goal into one of Gagne's learning domains
• Begin developing your subordinate skill analysis to fulfill all of Assignment 2
• Read Chapter 3

Instructional goal analysis consists of two steps:

1. Goal analysis
2. Subordinate skill analysis

Everything we will do this week has to do with Assignment 2.

This analysis phase enables the designer to define the specific content of an instructional unit and the sequential steps that the learner must complete to achieve the learning goal for that unit. Designers also perform prerequisite analysis to identify the subordinate skills that the learner must know or do to be able to complete each step. All of this information is then displayed in a flow diagram that visually represents the sequencing of tasks.

We will spend the next two weeks performing an instructional analysis. This week we will focus on goal analysis, which consists of two parts:

1. Classifying the goal statement (the one you developed last week) according to the type of learning that will occur
2. Identifying and sequencing the major steps required to perform the goal

Learning Objectives

• Classify instructional goals in the following domains: intellectual skill, verbal information, psychomotor skill, and attitude
• Perform a goal analysis to identify the major steps required to accomplish an instructional goal.

As you are probably beginning to find out if you have poked around in the instructional design literature, different steps in the design process are called different things. Don't let the terminology bother you. Task analysis, information processing analysis, or instructional analysis are just different terms for the analysis phase of systematic instructional design. The ultimate goal of the analysis phase is to determine what content should be included in a segment of instruction and how that content should be sequenced. What you are essentially doing is constructing a 'flow diagram' or 'model' of the knowledge that must be mastered in order to achieve a particular learning goal.

Learning Domains

First, however, let's talk about learning domains. Begin by classifying your instructional goal according to Gagne's five domains of learning. This is important because each domain has different implication for the goal analysis, including what learners should learn and how they will most efficiently learn to perform skills within the goal.

Learning tasks vary significantly in the amount and kind of cognitive effort required in the learning, in the types of conditions that support the learning, and in the ways to assess student achievement. Robert Gagné (1985) classified these different types of learning into five categories or domains, each of which requires a different type of mental processing:

1. Verbal information (declarative knowledge)
2. Intellectual skills (procedural knowledge)
   • forming concepts
   • applying rules
   • solving problems
3. Cognitive strategies (conditional knowledge)
4. Attitudes
5. Psychomotor skills

We will use Gagne's classification system in our course for the skills required to meet our overal instructional goal.

We will use Bloom's taxonomy to actually write the subordinate skills and entry-level behaviors. Benjamin Bloom created three knowledge domains:

1. cognitive
2. affective
3. psychomotor

We will concentrate on his cognitive domain. For a list of verbs in the Bloom's cognitive domain, see this table created by Dr. Grady.

Most instructional designers and teachers use Bloom's Taxonomy for guidance as they create learning objectives. Bloom helps us to gradually increase the level of thinking required by learners, which in turn promotes transfer and retention.

David Merrill is a leader in the field of instructional design. He taught at Utah State University for years. His article Instructional Strategies that Teach provides broader information on matching learning domains to instructional strategies. We'll return to his article later, but you may want to read it now.

Once you have classified your instructional goal, you are now ready to begin goal analysis. Based on my experience, this is the most difficult (and tedious) part of the instructional design process (which is probably why it's neglected so often). However, it is the most critical step, and the lack of instructional analysis is at the root of most poorly designed instruction. Don't get discouraged. This process is very cognitively challenging and will require a significant effort on your part. If this is the first time you've done a goal analysis, you may be unsure as to how large a 'chunk' of knowledge should be included in each step. Unfortunately, there are no rules to guide you. Remember, this is an iterative process. You may start out with 10 steps this week, then perform a subordinate skill analysis and end up with five, or twenty. Dick and Carey suggest 5-15 steps for each 1-2 hours of instruction. I think that's a reasonable place to start; you can always revise as necessary.

Here are some tools that you can use to help you create a flow diagram (download free 30 day trial).

• Inspiration
• Visio

Or, you may use any program that supports flow diagrams.

Suggested Reading

1. Chapter 3 of your Dick, Carey, and Carey text
2. Perform a task analysis George Mason U. Instructional Design Knowledge Base
3. Please read Assignment 2 and try to understand what it is asking you to do.
   

    

Assignments

Before you begin the goal analysis, you may want to ask one of your peers in this class to look at your instructional goal to see if it makes sense and is complete.

1. Classify your instructional goal according to Gagne's classification system (as a verbal skill, intellectual skill, cognitive strategy, psychomotor, or attitudinal. Your goal will likely be an intellectual skill.)
2. Perform a goal analysis to identify the major steps that learners must perform to demonstrate that they have acheived the goal.
3. Create a very basic, draft flow diagram that illustrates the sequence of these steps. This is just a first run at Assignment 2.

Online Class Discussion

Monday, September 22, 8-9:30 p.m., Eastern time via Webex.

Agenda:

• 8:00-8:10 Introductory discussion
• 8:10-8:45 Discussion of instructional goal classification and subordinate skill identification and analysis
• 8:45-:920 Discussion of your instructional goals and potential subordinate skills -- be prepared
• 9:20-9:30 Preview of next week

Please email me with any questions.