Prescriptive Principles for Instructional Design

Kevin Kennedy

R547 Computer-Mediated Learning

Week 1 Blog Post Summary & Discussion

May 12, 2013

The assignment for this week is to read, summarize, critique, and discuss the article Prescriptive Principles for Instructional Design by M. David Merrill, Matthew Barclay, and Andrew van Schaak. 

SUMMARY

The article is broken into three sections.  In the first section, the authors review the prescriptive principles identified by Merrill as the first principles of instruction.  For this article, instruction is defined as “a deliberate attempt to design a product or environment that facilitates the acquisition of specified learning goals.”   Merrill identified these first principles after reviewing an assortment of instructional design models and theories where he found these principles to be shared by all the models and theories he evaluated.  The first principles Merrill identified as being core to all the theories and model evaluated are:

• Task-centered approach
• Activation principle
• Demonstration principle
• Application principle
• Integration principle

These are the principles that Merrill identified as being required for developing effective, efficient, and engaging instruction.  The first principle (task-centered) isn’t really a principle as much as it is a context that states to design the learning around a real-world problem using a task-centered approach.  The remaining four principles (activation, demonstration, application, and integration) are interrelated (and overlapping) and describe the four phases used for engaging the student.  The authors go on to say that these first principles share three important properties:  (1) the success of any instructional program will be directly proportional to the degree to which first principles are implemented; (2) These first principles can (and should) be implemented in any delivery system and in any instructional architecture  system; and (3) These first principles are design orientated and not learning orientated (they describe how the content should be designed, not how the student will learn it.)  The authors cite that while these principles have been around for a long time – at least 200 years – they are not used very often.  The rest of this section elaborates on the first principles and includes a good discussion on the importance of using a structure, guidance, coaching, and reflection cycle.  The section ends with a discussion on the application of first principles and briefly examines several uses of first principle (e.g., NETg, Shell EP, Brigham Young-Hawaii) have been completed successfully. 

The second section of the article discusses (briefly) other instructional design principles that have been proposed as prescriptive models for instructional design by others. The following prescriptive instructional design models are summarized as to how they relate to first principles if instructional design.

• Principles for Multimedia Learning
• Principles for e-Learning
• Minimalist Principles
• Cognitive Training Model
• Instructional Principles Based on Learning Principles
•  4C/ID Instructional Design

The last section discusses designing task-centered instruction and starts by illustrating and explaining the Pebble-in- the Pond instructional design methodology that provides a systems based approach to using first principles for instructional design.   

CRITIQUE & DISCUSSION

In a way this looks like just another instructional design model.  I have been using Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction for years for designing and developing curriculum – it is the model I learned in the Navy’s Instructor Training course some years back and it seems to work very effectively.  I can also find Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction embedded in Gagne’s Nine Steps.  (For step 4, my instruction is always task-based.  The Task Analysis is the first step of the analysis phase followed by the gap analysis, content prioritization, sequencing, etc.)  Gagne’s Nine Events or Nine Steps are:

1. Gain attention
2. Describe the goal
3. Stimulate recall of prior knowledge
4. Present the material to be learned
5. Provide guidance for learning
6. Elicit performance / provide practice
7. Provide informative feedback
8. Assess performance
9. Enhance retention and transfer

For Merrill, does the First Principles replace his Component Display Theory or does it supplement it?  For the past ten years or so, the Navy has adopted Merrill’s Component Display Theory as the basis for its automated instructional design and curriculum development authoring tool.  When designing and developing content, the developer builds all the content around the four types of instructional content (facts, concepts, procedures and principles)  and the three types of performance (remembering, using, and finding) as defined by Merrill in the Component Display Theory.  All our Terminal and Enabling Learning Objectives are supported by the below table, except in Excel.  I see First Principles embedded in this model too.  

BASIC FORMAT USED BY CONTENT DEVELOPERS TO DEFINE CONTENT USING THE COMPONENT DISPLAY THEORY
	Facts	Concepts	Procedures	Principles
Remembering
Using
Finding

Now, with this said, I am for trying new and innovative ways of doing things, but I also want to be careful to not fix something that is not broken. 

REFERENCE

Merrill, M. D., Barclay, M., & Schaak, A. v. (2008). Prescriptive Principles for Instructional Design. In AECT Handbook (pp. 173-184).