Page 12 - Principles of instructional design

50 Principles of Instructional Design

DESIGNING INSTRUCTION USING HUMAN CAPABILITIES

The point of view presented in this chapter is that instruction should always be
designed to meet accepted educational goals. When goals are matched with
societal needs, the ideal condition exists for the planning of a total program of
education. Were such an undertaking to be attempted, the result would be, as a
first step, a list of human activities, each of which would have associated with it
an estimate of its importance in meeting the needs of the society.
When human activities derived from societal needs are in turn analyzed, they
yield a set of human capabilities. These are descriptions of what human adults in
a particular society ought to know and particularly what they ought to know how
to do. Such a set of capabilities would probablv not bear a close resemblance to
the traditional subject matter categories of the school curriculum. There would,
of course, be a relationship between human capabilities and the subjects of the
curriculum, but it would probablv not be a simple correspondence.
Most instructional design, as currendv carried out, centers upon course plan-
ning and design. We shall use such a framework in this book. However, we shall
continue to maintain an orientation toward the goals of instruction. Learning
outcomes cannot always be well identified, it appears, by the topical tides of
courses. They can be identified as the varieties of learned human capabilities that
make possible different tvpes of human performances. Accordingly, the present
chapter has provided an introduction to the five major categories of capabilities,
which will serve throughout the book as the basic framework of instructional
design.
If the instructional designer thinks 'These five categories are all well and
good, but all I'm really interested in is producing creative thinkers," he is fooling
himself. With the exception of motor skills, all of these categories are likely to be
involved in the planning of any course. One cannot have a course without informa-
tion, and one cannot have a course that doesn't affect attitudes to some degree. And
most importandy, one cannot have a course without intellectual skills.
There are a couple of reasons why intellectual skills play a central role in
designing the structure of a course of study. First, they are the kinds of capabili-
ties that determine what the student can do and, thus, are intimately bound up
with the description of a course in terms of its learning outcomes. A second
reason is that intellectual skills have a cumulative nature—they build upon each
other in a predictable manner. Accordingly, they provide the most useful model
for the sequencing of course structure. In the next chapter, we begin to look
more closelv at intellectual skills—what kinds are there, how can they be learned,
and how does one know when thev are learned?

SUMMARY

This chapter has shown that the defining of goals for education is a complex
problem. In part, this is because so much is expected of education. Some