Hypothesized Performance on Complex Tasks as a Function of Scaled Instructional Strategies

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. David Merrill: Hypothesized Performance on Complex Tasks as a Function of Scaled Instructional Strategies, IT Forum October 21, 2005

I really hated the title and wasn't expecting much as a consequence, but this turns out to be a pretty good paper, readable, informative and insightful. David Merrill's quest is for "an integrated body of research that supports... interrelated principles (of learning) as a whole," where the principles consist of five major categories: demonstration, application, task-centered, activation and integration. Whether this works as a taxonomy is open to debate (and I would argue there is some cross-categorization at work here). Still, from these principles Merril advances a set of hypothesized performance inprovements based on testing with specific learning outcomes in complex tasks. More...