Page 281 - Making Instruction Work

chap 21 3/11/97 5:18 PM Page 267

course improvement 267

the assistance or approval of someone else, regardless of
payoff. If you can improve the course a little bit today,
that’s at least as good as improving it a lot next year. For
example, if you could make your tests match your objec-
tives without needing approval to do so, that would be a
higher priority change than that of trying to get approval
to teach your course in a single 40-hour block.

3. High payoff fixes. Make the fixes that will provide the
highest payoff in course effectiveness, even if approval is
required. Here is the list of actions that will give you the
most return for your efforts, in order of priority:

a. Make objectives match the need. Check your objectives
against the need from which they were derived to
make sure that they describe what students need to be
able to do.

b. Provide outcome information to students. If you do
nothing else, make sure that a copy of the objectives is
in the hands of the students. This act will give them a
fighting chance of accomplishing what they need to
accomplish, even though instructional materials may
be scarce or poorly crafted.

c. Provide a reason to learn. Once students know what is
expected of them, the next best thing to do is to make
sure they have a solid reason to learn. So make those
changes that will help students perceive how it is
important to them to accomplish the objectives, and
remember that “Someday this will be important to
you” is not a reason to learn. Instead, it is merely a
symptom of instruction that hasn’t yet been made rel-
evant to the students.