[From Fred Nickols (970901.0715 EST)]
Once upon a time (actually, it was almost 30 years ago), I found myself the
Chief Instructor in charge of the Navy's Programmed Instruction Writer's
course. Our job was to train people to develop programmed instructional
materials. I had been dabbling in systems wizardry, behavior mod, and all
manner of instructional and educational methods and techniques, when it
occurred to me to rewrite the entire course based on a single premise:
If people could properly evaluate programmed instructional
materials, then learning to write them would be a job half
done (and maybe more than half).
So, I set about redesigning the course, focusing on teaching people how to
discriminate between "good frames and bad" (the title of a book by Susan
Markle), between sound sequences and not so sound one, and, in all, tell the
difference between a decent piece of programmed instruction and a not so
decent one.
The only theoretical notion I had at the time was Bloom's Taxonomy, which
suggested that cognitive mastery was pyramidal or layered, and that
evaluation, which stood at the pinnacle, encompassed all the other levels.
My reasoning was that if people could evaluate their own work products (in
this case, programmed instruction), then they could work out their own
versions of the work processes. In short, they could and would learn pretty
much on their own.
Well, it worked. And it worked far better than anyone imagined. For years,
the success of that redesign has been attributed to Bloom's Taxonomy, to the
notion that evaluation encompasses other abilities. However, I have thought
for some time now that the real reason for the success of the redesign has
to do more with PCT than it does Bloom's Taxonomy.
What I now think happened way back then is that a set of reference
conditions was successfully encoded, illustrated, transmitted, received,
understood, and acted upon. I also happen to think there's something very
important lurking in there about the way we go about training people. A
design principle that says something like, "Teach them how to evaluate their
work products before you teach them how to produce them."
Comments?
Regards,
Fred Nickols
nickols@worldnet.att.net