Page 8 - Principles of instructional design

46 Principles of Instructional Design —

essay. In other words, the cognitive strategy of induction may be put to use in a
great many situations of thinking and learning—situations that are enormously
varied in their describable properties. In fact, the performances that the learner
is able to exhibit in these situations mav be seen to resemble each other only in
the respect that they involve induction. And this, of course, is the basic reason
for believing that such a cognitive strategy exists—it is by an act of induction
that one arrives at the presence of the cognitive strategy of induction in other
people.

Verbal Information
Verbal information is the kind of knowledge we are able to state. It is knowing
that, or declarative knowledge. All of us have learned a great deal of verbal
information or verbal knowledge. We have readily available in our memories
many commonly used items of information such as the names of months, days
of the week, letters, numerals, towns, cities, states, countries, and so on. We also
have a great store of more highly organized information, such as many events of
U.S. history, the forms of government, the major achievements of science and
technology, and the components of the economy. The verbal information we
learn in school is in part "for the course onh'" and in part the kind of knowledge
we are expected to be able to recall readily as adults.
The learner usually acquires a great deal of information from formal instruc-
tion. Much is also learned in an incidental fashion. Such information is stored in
the learner's memory, but it is not necessarily "memorized" in the sense that it
can be repeated verbatim. Something like the gist of paragraph-long passages is
stored in memory and recalled in that form when the occasion demands. The
example given in Table 3-1 refers to the performance of telling what the Fourth
Amendment says. A second example is a learner's description of a set of events,
such as might have taken place in an automobile accident. Students of science
learn much verbal information, just as students do in other fields of study. They
learn the properties of materials, objects, and living things, for example. A large
number of "science facts" may not constitute a defensible primary goal of science
instruction. Nevertheless, the learning of such facts is an essential part of the
learning of science. For example, a student may learn that "the boiling point of
water is 100°C." One major function of such information is to provide the
learner with directions for how to proceed in further learning. Thus, in learning
about the change of state of materials from liquid to gaseous form, the learner
may be acquiring an intellectual skill (that is, a rule) that relates atmospheric
pressure to vaporization. In working with this relationship, a student may be
asked to apply the rule to a situation that describes the temperature of boiling
water at an altitude of 9000 feet. At this juncture, the information given in the
example must be recalled in order to proceed with the application of the rule.
One may be inclined to say this information is not particularly important
rather, the learning of the intellectual skill is the important thing. There is no