Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:3151] RE: Principles of best practice
From: Mark Nichols (M.Nichols@ucol.ac.nz)
Date: Sun 14 Apr 2002 - 23:35:17 MEST
From: Mark Nichols <M.Nichols@ucol.ac.nz> Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:3151] RE: Principles of best practice Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2002 09:35:17 +1200
Ivan,
You seem to have equated 'best practice' with 'individualisation' in your
message - is this intentional? You certainly have me thinking. I certainly
agree that a best practice approach to education requires some form of
individualised instruction, but this does lead to some ugly questions:
* Does this mean that learning typologies are irrelevant for best practice?
If not, what is their role?
* Does best practice require an instructor to 'know' their students to make
individualisation possible? I believe that this will seriously impact on the
workload of the instructor - in fact, it would fuundamentally change their
role and require an overhaul of existing teaching paradigms. Of course, an
alternative (that you mention) would be to create the individualisation
artifically using technology - but will this be enough?
I would be interested in learning more about your 16 principles - perhaps
you could share them in this forum?
Thanks for your insight,
Mark.
-----Original Message-----
From: Ivan Beale [mailto:ibeale@bigpond.com]
Sent: Sunday, 14 April 2002 2:12 p.m.
To: IFETS-Discussion
Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:3145] Principles of best practice
Thanks for this, Mark. I am a psychologist specializing in human
learning, especially theory and practice in remediation of learning
problems. Your paper outlines what I would regard as a set of issue
issues that all reflect a fundamental question - what are the best
principles for individualizing learning and instruction? Research in
the psychology of learning suggests that the answer is not be be found
in typologies based on individual learners' expressed or revealed
preferences for instruction modalities. My take on the research
evidence is that typologies like 'learning styles' haven't worked as an
instructional design principle. There is a long history of unsuccessful
attempts to find a typology that works. So far as I am aware, none have
been supported by careful scrutiny in clinical trials and meta-analyses.
This doesn't mean that individual learners don't approach a new
learning situation with an existing array of learning strategies that
they have developed from past experiences. rather, typologies based on
simple characterizations of those strategies appear not to be helpful.
My response to this problem was to find a set of 16 'principles of
effective instruction' that seemed sufficient to individualize
instruction for efficient learning. Individually, these principles are
research-based, but no instruction program using the whole set has yet
been formally evaluated. The basic idea is that an instructional
program that will be effective for all learners must be able to respond
to initial differences between individuals on many significant variables
that influence learning. These include variables in the basic domains
of motivation, emotion, perception, memory, and executive functioning.
These initial differences in learner characteristics could be described
as differences in cognitive or metacognitive strategies, learning
styles, learning aptitudes, learning attributions, and so on, but the
instructional program deals with them at the level of basic
psychological concepts (perception, memory, etc). The instructional
program interacts with the learner to detect 'where the learner is at'
with respect to the skills being taught, and adjusts the memory,
perceptual, attentional, etc., requirements of the task to ensure
initial success. As the learner progresses, the relevant task variables
are progressively adjusted using 'scaffolding' algorithms.
My point is this. Typologies have a bad history in the psychology of
learning. An alternative strategy is not to 'type' learners, but treat
them all as individuals with unique learner characteristics. The great
benefit of digital interactive multimedia is that it can handle this
task easily. The challenge is for us to conceptualise what the program
has to do and how to write the functional specifications. [It took me
and others 2 years to write the specs and produce an expert system,
based on these principles, to teach basic reading skills - finished now,
but still to be evaluated].
Ivan Beale
Learning Consultant
Sydney
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