Chapter Eleven
Approaches to Instruction
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Overview
• Devising and using objectives
• The behavioral approach to teaching
• The cognitive approach to teaching
• The humanistic approach to teaching
• The social approach to teaching
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Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Cognitive Domain
• Knowledge– Remembering previously learned information
such as facts, terms, and principles
• Comprehension– Grasping the meaning of information by putting
it into one’s own words
• Application– Applying knowledge to actual situations
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Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Cognitive Domain
• Analysis– Breaking down ideas into simpler parts and
seeing how the parts relate and are organized
• Synthesis– Rearranging component ideas into a new
whole
• Evaluation– Making judgments based on internal evidence
or external criteria
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Taxonomy Categories and Problem Solving
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Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Affective Domain
• Receiving (attending)– Willingness to receive or attend
• Responding– Active participation indicating positive
response or acceptance of an idea
• Valuing– Expressing a belief or attitude about the value
or worth of something
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Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Affective Domain
• Organization– Organizing various values into an internalized
system
• Characterization by a value or value complex– The value system becomes a way of life
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Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Psychomotor Domain
• Perception– Using sense organs to obtain cues needed to guide
motor activity
• Set– Being ready to perform a particular action
• Guided response– Performing under the guidance of a model
• Mechanism– Being able to perform a task habitually with some
degree of confidence and proficiency
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Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Psychomotor Domain
• Complex or overt response– Performing a task with a high degree of
proficiency and skill
• Adaptation– Using previously learned skills to perform new
but related tasks
• Origination– Creating new performances after having
developed skills
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Mager’s Recommendations for Use of Specific Objectives
• Describe what you want learners to be doing when demonstrating achievement and indicate how you will know they are doing it.
• In your description, identify and name the behavioral act that indicates achievement, define the conditions under which the behavior is to occur, and state the criterion of acceptable performance.
• Write a separate objective for each learning performance.
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Gronlund’s Recommendations for Use of General Objectives
• Examine what is to be learned with reference to lists of objectives. Use such lists to formulate general objectives of instruction that describe types of behavior students should exhibit.
• Under each general instructional objective, list up to five specific learning outcomes that provide a representative sample of what students should be able to do when they have achieved the general objective.
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Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Objectives
• Objectives seem to work best when students are aware of them, treat them as directions to learn specific sections of material, and feel they will aid learning.
• Objectives seem to work best when they are clearly written and the learning task is neither too difficult nor too easy.
• Students of average ability seem to profit more from being given objectives than do students of higher or lower ability.
• Objectives lead to an improvement in intentional learning but to a decline in incidental learning.
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The Behavioral Approach to Teaching: Direct Instruction
• Focusing almost all classroom activity on learning basic academic knowledge and skills.
• Having the teacher make all instructional decisions.
• Keeping students working productively toward learning new academic knowledge and skills as much as possible.
• Maintaining a positive classroom climate by emphasizing positive reinforcement and avoiding the use of aversive consequences.
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Components of Direct Instruction
• Orientation– Introduction and overview of the lesson
• Presentation– Explaining and demonstrating new material
• Structured practice– Teacher leads class through problem
• Guided practice– Students work on problems with teacher assistance
• Independent practice– Students practice on their own
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Using Technology to Support Behavioral Approaches
• Drill-and-practice CBI tools
• Integrated learning systems
• Multimedia to embellish a lecture
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The Cognitive Approach to Teaching: Facilitating Meaningful & Self-Directed Learning
• Communicate clear goals• Use attention-getting devices• Emphasize organization and
meaningfulness• Present information in learnable amounts
and over realistic time periods• Facilitate encoding of information into long-
term memory • Practice what you preach
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The Cognitive Approach to Teaching: Constructivism
• Provide scaffolded instruction within the zone of proximal development (ZPD)
• Provide opportunities for learning by discovery
• Foster multiple viewpoints
• Emphasize relevant problems and tasks
• Encourage students to become self-directed learners
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Using Technology to Support Cognitive Approaches
• Helping students process information
• Discovery and exploratory environments
• Guided learning
• Problem- and project-based learning
• Situated learning
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The Humanistic Approach to Teaching: Student-Centered Instruction
• The humanistic approach pays particular attention to the role of noncognitive variables in learning; specifically, students’ needs, emotions, values, and self-perceptions.
• Maslow: Let Children Grow
• Rogers: Learner-Centered Education
• Combs: The Teacher as Facilitator
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The Humanistic Model
• Defining the helping situation
• Exploring the problem
• Developing insight
• Planning and decision making
• Integration
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Using Technology to Support Humanistic Approaches
• Learner-centered process
• Helping students meaningfully construct and represent knowledge
• Create challenging and novel learning environments that help students link new information to old
• Achieve complex learning goals
• Build thinking and reasoning strategies
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The Social Approach to Teaching: Teaching Students How to Learn from Each Other
• Competitive structures– Structures in which one’s grade is determined by how
well everyone else in the group performs
• Individualistic structures– Structures that are characterized by students working
alone and earning rewards solely on the quality of their own efforts
• Cooperative structures– Structures that are characterized by students working
together to accomplish shared goals
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Elements of Cooperative Learning
• Group heterogeneity
• Group goals/positive interdependence
• Promotive interaction
• Individual accountability
• Interpersonal skills
• Equal opportunities for success
• Team competition
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Why Does Cooperative Learning Work?
• Motivational effect
• Cognitive-developmental effect
• Cognitive elaboration effect
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Using Technology to Support Social Approaches
• Social constructivist learning
• Cooperative and collaborative learning