Tutor Lesson

Behaviorism

Behaviorism explains learning through consequences. Rewarding a behavior makes its repetition more likely, while punishment makes it less likely. This classical-conditioning perspective can become more detailed through reward schedules, but its central claim is simple: consequences influence behavior. It is particularly useful for observable skills and habits.

Constructivism

Constructivism proposes that people form conclusions by experiencing the world. Learners build their own understanding from those experiences, so this perspective favors learning by doing, realistic situations, and guided discovery over direct explanation alone.

Cognitivism

Cognitivism, also called cognitive information processing, strongly influences modern instructional design. It compares the mind to a computer: information enters, is processed, and may be stored for later retrieval. The theory examines attention, processing, memory, encoding, and recall—processes that matter whenever designers help people learn and remember.

Connectivism

Connectivism responds to learning in a digitally connected world. Knowledge does not reside only in an individual's memory; it can also be reached through a network of books, online resources, and other people. A learner is one node within that larger network and can learn how to locate and use externally stored information.

Sensory Memory

Information first arrives through sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Sensory memory briefly holds a vast stream of data, such as room sounds, a visual scene, or temperature on the skin. Because conscious thought cannot process all of it, attention determines what advances.

Attention and Working Memory

Attended sensory information enters short-term memory, also known as working memory. A clap, for example, may draw attention and bring that sound into conscious processing. Attention is therefore the entry point for learning: when learners do not attend, the intended information goes no further.

Working memory holds only a limited amount for a brief period. Remembering a phone number just long enough to enter it illustrates this limit. Mental rehearsal helps keep information available there.

Encoding and Long-Term Memory

For durable learning, information must be encoded from working memory into long-term memory. Encoding occurs by linking new material with knowledge already stored. Categorizing ideas, imagining related visuals, or connecting a new concept to something familiar all help form those links.

• Attention is indispensable because unattended information cannot continue through the process.
• Recalling prior knowledge brings relevant material into working memory and makes new connections easier to build.
• Long-term memory is treated as essentially unlimited; difficulty retrieving something indicates a recall problem rather than lost storage.

This model explains why instructional approaches often activate earlier learning. Helping learners retrieve what they know supports the encoding and later recall of new material.

ADDIE

ADDIE is the best-known instructional design framework. It began as a military waterfall model, and its name represents five major activities.

• Analyze: collect evidence about the audience, setting, need, and underlying problem, then determine what is actually required.
• Design: plan the instruction by setting objectives, organizing content, and choosing instructional strategies.
• Develop: produce the learning materials, such as eLearning, videos, or facilitator guides.
• Implement: deliver the experience—for example, facilitate a workshop or launch an online course through a learning management system.
• Evaluate: determine how effective the program is.

Teams rarely follow ADDIE as a rigid sequence because late findings can force extensive rework. Even so, it clearly summarizes the essential work. Analysis deserves special emphasis: without diagnosing the real issue, a designer may build an impressive response that cannot solve it.

• Needs analysis asks what outcome is required and whether training is appropriate. The obstacle might instead be faulty software or missing incentives.
• Audience analysis examines who the learners are, what they know, and how comfortable they are with relevant technology.
• Context analysis considers both the learning setting and the place of application, such as a sales floor where only mobile devices are available.

Useful analysis methods include interviews, surveys, direct observation, and reviews of existing data, documents, and training. The work resembles medical diagnosis: a doctor investigates a suspected infection instead of immediately prescribing antibiotics. Likewise, a designer should diagnose before proposing a learning solution; skipping this work can waste millions of dollars.

SAM: Successive Approximation

SAM offers an iterative alternative to ADDIE's waterfall structure. Its simplified cycle is Evaluate → Design → Develop → Repeat, with evaluation covering analysis as well as testing. Designers begin with inexpensive prototypes, perhaps paper sketches or simple PowerPoint versions, place them before learners, collect feedback, and refine them. This repeated movement toward a more effective solution suits fast-moving technology environments.

Dick and Carey

Dick and Carey is an academically prominent systems model. It treats the elements of instruction as connected, so a change to one element affects the others.

1. Identify instructional goals: establish the highest-level result the instruction should accomplish.
2. Conduct instructional analysis: identify the required kind of learning, such as motor performance, memorization, or problem-solving, and analyze the learners.
3. Write performance objectives: specify measurable outcomes that collectively support the instructional goal.
4. Develop assessment instruments: decide how achievement of each objective will be measured, often through a final test in corporate settings.
5. Develop the instructional strategy: choose activities and content that prepare learners to meet the objectives and succeed on the assessment.

The distinctive sequence places assessment immediately after objectives and before instruction. Designers then build backward, including only what supports successful performance. Formative and summative evaluation can trigger revisions throughout the connected system.

Design Thinking

Design thinking is an iterative, human-centered process that places empathy and creative problem-solving at the center.

1. Empathize: spend time with the audience to understand its circumstances, needs, and difficulties.
2. Define: express the problem that needs to be solved.
3. Ideate: generate possible answers without judging them too early.
4. Prototype: make simple versions of several promising ideas that can be tested.
5. Test: gather learner feedback on the prototypes and return to empathy when the proposed solutions fail.

The process overlaps with instructional design: empathizing and defining resemble analysis, ideation and prototyping resemble design and development, and testing supplies evaluation. Its special emphasis is close human connection and creativity.

Choosing an Approach

Formative and Summative Evaluation

• Formative evaluation occurs while a program is still being formed. A pilot audience may test part of the experience, or a facilitator may question participants and adjust a live session. Early evidence supports improvement before full release.
• Summative evaluation follows completion and delivery to the intended audience. It examines overall effectiveness through assessment results, workplace application, and changes in relevant business measures.

Kirkpatrick's Four Levels

Kirkpatrick's model is the field's most widely used evaluation framework. Practitioners commonly refer to its four categories by level number.

• Level 1—Reaction: determine how learners felt about the experience, including whether they liked it or found it engaging, commonly through surveys.
• Level 2—Learning: use tests or performance tasks to determine whether learners acquired the intended material.
• Level 3—Behavior: examine whether people apply the learning and act differently in their work.
• Level 4—Results: identify tangible organizational effects, such as higher sales, safer work, or fewer errors.

Plan backward from Level 4: identify the desired result, the behavior needed to produce it, the learning required for that behavior, and the reaction needed for engagement. This sequence places evaluation at the project's beginning instead of treating it as a late addition.

The Six Cognitive Levels

The revised Bloom's Taxonomy arranges cognitive performance from straightforward recall to the production of new work. Each level suggests verbs for writing objectives.

• Remember: define, list, memorize, recall.
• Understand: explain, describe, summarize, interpret.
• Apply: solve, demonstrate, use, implement.
• Analyze: compare, differentiate, examine, categorize.
• Evaluate: critique, judge, justify, defend.
• Create: design, construct, develop, produce.

Make Performance Observable

Select verbs that describe visible, assessable action. Words such as “understand” and “appreciate” are too indefinite because they do not reveal what evidence would demonstrate success.

Match the objective to a feasible assessment. Recall and explanation may be tested with multiple-choice questions, whereas evaluation and creation usually need projects, essays, discussions, or similar evidence. A self-paced eLearning course may not be able to assess complex creation meaningfully, so its objectives should reflect what the format can actually measure.

Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction

Gagne's model guides the design phase by identifying nine elements of a comprehensive learning experience. They need not appear in a rigid sequence, but each should be represented.

1. Gain attention: focus interest with a question, hook, unexpected fact, or scenario.
2. Inform learners of objectives: preview what they will be able to do, using conversational language when formal wording would disengage them.
3. Stimulate recall: use reflection, discussion, a question, or a pretest to bring relevant long-term knowledge into working memory.
4. Present the content: deliver the new material.
5. Provide learning guidance: support comprehension and memory with mnemonics, analogies, examples, or study suggestions.
6. Elicit performance: let learners practice applying what they have learned.
7. Provide feedback: show learners how they are doing and correct mistaken practice through automated or instructor-delivered responses.
8. Assess performance: use a final assessment to determine whether the objectives were met.
9. Enhance retention and transfer: connect learning to real use through job aids, application examples, or plans for using the skill at work.

The nine events are especially useful for face-to-face and virtual instructor-led sessions, and they can also be adapted to self-paced eLearning.

The ARCS Motivation Model

John Keller's ARCS model provides a structure for building motivation into the full learning experience.

• Attention: attract and maintain interest through variety, curiosity, or surprise.
• Relevance: connect the material with learners' work or lives so they can see why it matters.
• Confidence: establish clear success expectations and provide practice that becomes progressively more demanding.
• Satisfaction: create a sense of achievement through useful application, visible results, certificates, or positive feedback.

Chunking

Chunking divides related information into smaller units that working memory can manage. Instead of retaining ten isolated digits, for example, a person can group a phone number as 555-123-4567. Because working memory holds only a few elements—and fewer when material is complex—grouping reduces cognitive demand.

In eLearning, chunking often produces microlearning: self-contained lessons lasting roughly two to fifteen minutes, each centered on one objective. Content should be separated into its smallest logical units and offered independently when possible.

Scaffolding

Scaffolding supplies substantial help for unfamiliar or difficult work, then withdraws that help as competence and confidence grow. Like training wheels, early guidance, hints, and easier practice prepare learners for increasingly demanding tasks and eventual independence.

Practice with Feedback

Practice builds performance only when learners can tell whether they are practicing correctly. Without feedback, errors may be strengthened rather than corrected.

Feedback may come from a facilitator or from an automated explanation after an eLearning question. In either case, it should arrive promptly, identify what needs adjustment, and be specific enough to guide the next attempt.

Cognitive Load

Cognitive load theory applies the limits of working memory to design. Intrinsic load comes from the material's inherent difficulty. Extraneous load is avoidable mental effort introduced by weak design. The designer should reduce extraneous load so that limited attention remains available for learning.

• Keep a question and its answer options together rather than forcing learners to remember the question across screens.
• Limit visuals and animation that pull attention away from the main idea.
• Write concise, unambiguous instructions.
• Maintain a consistent layout.

Mayer's Multimedia Principles

Richard Mayer's principles guide multimedia instruction in formats such as video, eLearning, presentations, television, computers, and audio. Two principles have especially direct design implications.

• Personalization principle: a direct, friendly, conversational style supports learning better than distant academic language.
• Coherence principle: remove words, sounds, images, and activities that do not advance the learning objectives, even when they seem entertaining or memorable.

There are at least twelve multimedia principles. Other topics include modality, such as pairing sound with visuals, and redundancy, such as avoiding duplicated narration and on-screen text.

Self-Directed Learning

Adult learners especially value control over their learning. A compulsory, inflexible route can frustrate them and reduce effectiveness, so designers should create meaningful choices whenever the material allows it.

• Permit non-linear exploration, such as choosing modules from a table of contents when topics do not depend on a fixed sequence.
• Do not require every second of narration to finish before allowing the learner to continue.
• Present required learning as a useful resource that helps performance, rather than emphasizing compulsion.

Greater freedom can strengthen motivation and learning outcomes, so each design should be examined for appropriate opportunities to give learners control.