Essentials of Learning for Instruction Part 1

Multiple Learning Goals

The course and topic, and even the subtopic, are seldom designed to achieve a single type of learning outcome. Typically, the course or topic is expected to attain two or more of the kinds of learning goals. verbal information, intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, attitudes, and motor skills. A course in public speaking, for example, is usually designed to bring about not only the learning of rules for precise oral communication (intellectual skills), but also the acquisition of an attitude of "projecting to an audience" and probably the cognitive strategies involved in originating an extemporaneous speech. A course in American Government typically has multiple goals: the acquisition of information about the forms and procedures of government, an attitude of respect for democratic processes, and probably also cognitive strategies applicable to the solution of social problems.
It is of some importance to adequate course or topic planning, therefore, to identify various types of learning objectives and to make suitable provision for each of them. The course designer may begin his planning with multiple objectives in mind, but the details of planning may "carry him away" so that he neglects something he really intended to include. For example, a teacher wishes to design a topic with the outcomes of (1) information about harmful drugs and (2) an attitude unfavorable to the abuse of drugs. As planning proceeds, a great deal of information is collected about drugs, their composition, common names, and effects upon the human body. be skillfully organized and put in a meaningful context, perhaps including tables and diagrams. When the plan is finished, it may be admired as an excellent example of a well-organized presentation. But what has become of the attitude as a goal? The designer will readily see that almost no provision has been made for this goal. Thus, if the topic is to fulfill both of its purposes, it must be redesigned.
Procedures of instructional planning to insure the identification and inclusion of multiple outcomes may be aided by two kinds of "editing." First, one can check to see that certain important features of instruction relevant to the proposed learning outcomes have been included. (These are the critical learning conditions suggested by Table 4.2.) Second, by applying an "outcome question," one can insure that the instruction being designed is indeed likely to reach its intended objective.
The designer of a course or topic that is intended to establish the capability of verbal information might ask himself two editing questions as he proceeds with the design: (1) Has a meaningful context been provided, and are there suggested ways of coding the information to be learned and stored? (2) When the topic has been completed, will the student be able to state the desired information (orally or in writing)? Similar questions pertaining to instructional features and outcomes are listed for the other types of capabilities to be learned. Their systematic application to course and topic planning should help to maintain the goals of multiple outcomes.

Prerequisite Sequences

Quite apart from the logical or time-ordered sequences of instruction units inherent in the content of a course or topic, there are sometimes reasons for sequencing relating to the support of learning. Intellectual skills typically require the prior learning of simpler component skills (for example, see Figure 4.1). The sequences of skill learning thus implied will be described more fully in the next section, dealing with planning the individual lesson. Sometimes, however, prerequisite skills may overlap several topics of a course. For example, the identification of the factors of a number may initially be learned in the arithmetic topic, multiplication, but it also occurs in the topics of division and fractions. Similarly, in English instruction, the agreement of verbs and pronoun subjects may initially be learned in a topic on pronouns, but is encountered again in the topics of sentence and paragraph writing.
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