Page 5 - Principles of instructional design

The Outcomes of Instruction 43
task comparable to applying the rules of grammar to sentences. Instructional
planning can be vastly simplified by assigning learning objectives to five major
categories of human capabilities (Gagne, 1985). Such categories can be formed
because each leads to a different class of human performance. (As will be seen
later, each category also requires a different set of instructional conditions for
Effective learning.) Within each of these five categories, regardless of the subject
matter of instruction, the same qualities of performance apply. Of course, there
may be subcategories within each of the five categories. In fact, there are some
subcategories that are useful for instructional planning, as the next chapter will
show. But for the moment, in taking a fairly general look at instructional
planning from the standpoint of courses, five categories provide the com-
prehensive view.

FIVE CATEGORIES OF LEARNING OUTCOMES

What are the categories of objectives expected as learning outcomes? A brief
definition and description of each is given in the following paragraphs. The
performances that may be observed as learning outcomes are considered to be
made possible by internally stored states of the human learner, called capabilities.
A fuller description of the usefulness of these capabilities will be given in a later
section; conditions necessary for their learning are described in following chap-
ters.

Intellectual Skills
Intellectual skills enable individuals to interact with their environment in terms
of symbols or conceptualizations. Their learning begins in the early grades with
the three R's, and progresses to whatever level is compatible with the in-
dividual's interests and intellectual ability. They make up the most basic and the
most pervasive structure of formal education. They range from elementary
language skills such as composing a sentence to the advanced technical skills of
science, engineering, and other disciplines. Examples of intellectual skills of the
latter sort would be finding the stresses in a bridge or predicting the effects of
currency devaluation. The five kinds of capabilities that are outcomes of learning
are listed in Table 3-1 along with the examples of the intellectual skills of
identifying a diagonal and demonstrating the rule of using pronouns in the
objective case following a preposition.
Learning an intellectual skill means learning how to do something of an
intellectual sort. Generally, what is learned is called procedural knowledge (An-
derson, 1985). Such learning contrasts with learning that something exists or
has certain properties. The latter is verbal information. Learning how to identify
a sonnet by its rhyme pattern is an intellectual skill, whereas learning what the
sonnet savs is an instance of verbal information. A learner mav, of course, learn