Page 82 - Making Instruction Work

chap 6 3/4/97 4:14 PM Page 70

70 making instruction work

Sometimes, when products are so new that subject-matter
specialists do not yet exist, the task analysis has to be done by
analyzing the available documentation (e.g., engineering
drawings) to answer the question,“What do we imagine some-
one will be doing when performing this task?”

Deriving Skills
Once the task analysis shows the components of competent
performance, you can then derive the skills that anyone would
need to have before practicing the entire task. To do this you
need to forget about students for the moment (though you’ll
think a great deal about them later).At this point you are inter-
ested only in naming the skills that anyone in the world would
have to have before practicing the task step you are considering.

How to Do It

1. Consider each step of your analysis in turn.
2. In a column to the right of the step, write the skills that
anyone would have to have before they could practice
that step. Note: Lots of steps won’t require you to write
anything beside them because they are simple or have no
sub-skills, such as, “Pick up wrench,” or “Locate Box 3.”
Don’t make it harder than it is.
3. When you have finished, delete the duplications from
your list of skills. For example, it is likely that you have
written “Read English” beside several of the steps,
because, among other things, someone would have to be
able to read to perform that step. If the reading skill
required for each step is the same, delete the duplica-
tions. If, however, different levels of reading skill are
required for the various steps, they do not represent
duplications and should not be deleted.
4. Later on, you’ll draft an objective to describe each of the
remaining skills.