Page 13 - Principles of instructional design

The Outcomes of Instruction 51

persons would like education to emphasize the importance of understanding the
history of mankind; some would like it to perpetuate the present culture or
present academic disciplines; some would stress the need to help children and
young adults adjust to a rapidly changing society; and others would hope that
i education could prepare students to become agents improving themselves and
the society in which thev live.
One source of complexity' in defining educational goals arises from the need
to translate goals from the very general to the increasingly specific. Many layers
of such goals would be needed to be sure that each topic in the curriculum
actually moves the learner a step closer to the distant goal. Probably, this
mapping has never been done completely for anv curriculum. Thus, there tend
to be large gaps from general goals to the specific objectives for courses in the
curriculum. A major problem then remains—the need to define course objec-
tives in the absence of an entire network of connections between the most
general goals and the specific course objectives.
Despite the involved nature of this problem, means are available for classify-
ing course objectives into categories, that then make it possible to examine the
scope of types of human capabilities the course is intended to develop. One
purpose of such taxonomies (sets of performance categories) is to evaluate the
objectives themselves in their entirety. The taxonomy presented in this chapter
contains the following categories of learned capabilities:

1. Intellectual skills
2. Cognitive strategies
3. Verbal information
4. Motor skills
5. Attitudes
The usefulness of learning each of these types of capabilities has been discussed
and will be treated in greater detail in later chapters.
Uses of such a taxonomy, in addition to the evaluation of the variety of
capabilities a course is intended to produce in the learner, include the following:

1. The taxonomy can help to group specific objectives of a similar nature together
and, thus, reduce the work needed to design a total instructional strategy.
2. The groupings of objectives can aid in determining the sequence of segments of
a course of study.
3. The grouping of objectives into types of capabilities can then be utilized to plan
the internal and external conditions of learning estimated to be required for
successful learning.

Each performance objective of a course defines a unique performance ex-
pected as an outcome of the instruction. By grouping objectives into the five
categories of capabilities which have been described, one also can assess the
adequacy of coverage in each category, while capitalizing upon the fact that the
conditions of learning are the same for each objective within that category.