Page 70 - Making Instruction Work

chap 6 3/4/97 4:14 PM Page 58

58 making instruction work

so that they can say, “Aha. This is what we want people to do
on the job; those are the things they don’t yet know how to do;
so here are the things we will have to teach them.”
Those teaching in educational institutions, however, are
working in a “cottage industry” environment where instruc-
tors often behave as though they were in “business” for them-
selves. This is an environment where each instructor decides
what to teach and how much of the subject to include in the
time allotted; where five instructors teaching a course with the
same name are likely to be teaching five different courses;
where the objectives of one course in a series are seldom
derived from the prerequisites of the next one in line; where
the objectives of the last course in line are seldom derived from
any aspect of the real world where the learned skills are expect-
ed to be applied.
But all is not lost. You can use yourself as one source of
information for the task analysis. Then again, you must know
some people who do this thing in the “real world.”You can talk
to them, and maybe observe them as they work. And you can
find out from the instructors of the next courses in the
sequence what they expect students to be able to do when they
enter those courses, because their prerequisites should be, at
least in part, your objectives.

How to Do It

The task analysis involves: (a) drafting a task list (an activi-
ty sometimes referred to as job analysis) and then (b) describ-
ing the steps in each of the tasks listed.

Task Listing

The first step is to list all the tasks that make up the job. It
makes no difference that one task may be considered critical
and another trivial. They are all to be listed, so that a complete