Week 8 - Instructional Strategies leading to Procedures and Principles Knowledge

This week, we will learn about Procedures and Principles and design E-learning Instructions for them.

Procedures knowledge is knowing how things work. It involves mental and physical activities. It is characterized by a sequence of actions and/or algorithm, and may include decision points.

Key Instructional Elements for Procedural Learning:

Tell Me - this part involves learner's discernment as to when is the appropriate situation to use procedural learning and listing the steps/decision points needed to carry out the learning.

Show Me - this part involves learner's observation of how the learning process is carried out on the whole and/or part of the procedure.

Let Me Try - this part involves learners to recall the steps taken, execute them and evaluate on the performance.

For E-Learning, the 2 most difficult instructional elements are Practice and Feedback. For Practice, depending on the task and learner, Whole or Part learning may be useful. Whole learning is useful if the task has highly integrated parts and/or if the learner is highly skilled and able to remember long sequences. Part learning is useful if the task is very complex and/or if the learner is not able to concentrate for a long time. For Feedback, learners can do self check and reflection and get aid from external sources e.g. tutors, e-tutors or digital materials.

For teaching Procedures, practice is difficult if learner has bad memory or short attention span. Some of the possible solutions are, to have more videos/pictures than texts because humans are more visual creatures or to sensationalize the learning process by including interesting articles that can capture the attention of the audiences.

Principle Knowledge is a combination of Procedures, Concepts and Facts. Some examples of principle are Psychology, Marketing, Biology, Racism etc. It is characterized by variables, concepts, contexts and conditions, and the relationship between these factors.

Key Instructional Elements for Procedural Learning:
1. Stating the principle
2. Know when and where to apply the principle (context)
3. Illustrate and/or Explain the Variables/Factors
4. State the Conditions of learning and the Context of usage (whether it would be good to use real materials or E-learning methods).

As with Procedural Learning, Practice and Feedback are the 2 difficult components for teaching principles. I guess it is difficult to practice principles e.g. gravity. We can feel it, but we can't really explain it clearly or practice it. We just know it is like that. A simple demonstration of throwing an object into the sky and letting it drop would be the closest we can get.