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chap 3 3/11/97 4:45 PM Page 17

strategy of instructional development 17

Analyzing the Need (Part II)

The moral of one of my fables says that if you don’t know
where you’re going, you might wind up someplace else—and
not even know it. That seems pretty obvious. But how can you
decide where to go in the first place? How can you decide on a
worthy destination?
The analysis procedures available to the instructional devel-
oper are intended to deal precisely with these issues. They help
to answer questions such as these:
• Is instruction called for in this situation?

• If not, what remedies should be applied?

• If so, what is worth teaching?

• Who is the target audience for this instruction?

• What should this instruction accomplish, i.e., what does
exemplary performance look like?

The answers to these questions make it easy to prepare
instruction that will teach people the things that will add value
to the individual student, and to avoid teaching things that
won’t.

Performance Analysis (Chapter 4)

Though it often seems hard to believe, instructors are fre-
quently asked to develop courses intended to teach people
what they already know, or to use instruction to solve prob-
lems that can’t be solved by instruction.
The performance analysis procedure helps to prevent these
instructional errors by revealing the differences between what
people are actually doing and what they should be doing, by
detecting which of those differences can be eliminated by