Discovering Instructional Design 7: Objectives Analysis

As I've discussed in previous posts, an important element in the instructional design process is the identification of learner entry behaviors. It is critical to the instructional development process that designers understand what skills, knowledge and experience their learners need to bring to the instructional process. In the area of skills and behaviors, it is important for the designer to identify them before producing the instructional materials. The pre-attained skills required of learners to begin the a learning program are called entry behaviors.

With that in mind, there are several valuable techniques used to analyze the objectives the ID has develop. I will cover three approaches today.

Now read on…

Hierarchical analysis
These are diagrams or tables showing the dependency relationships between the objectives, so that it becomes clear which objectives must be learned before others are attempted.

The hierarchical approach is used to analyze goals that are identified as being intellectual or psychomotor skills. It's purpose is to identify the foundational knowledge or rules that need to be taught/learned before the subsequent steps are taught.Subordinate skills are analyzed and then those skills are further analyzed. Hierarchical analysis is a top down model (see Figure 1), where each lower step supports the skills required by the steps above it.

Figure 1 Hierarchical Table

The IS should ask the following questions:

• What does the learner need to know in order to accomplish this step?
• What mistake might a learner make in completing this step?

Grouping or clustering
Sometimes objectives are too small to cover one at a time. In this case, they may be grouped into higher units, whether called “lessons”, “topics” or “modules”. As an aside, this leads on to one of the great ongoing debates in learning: what constitutes a learning object / lesson / section / module? As you will know if you design learning and development programs for a range of training institutions, corporations, and public organizations, each of them uses a terminology when delineating the same (or similar) discrete units of learning content. But I digress.

When clustering is indicated, a useful guideline may be to distinguish between enabling and terminal objectives. An enabling objective usually forms part of a subset of objectives that collectively enable the learner to demonstrate a terminal objective, which can be described as the key behaviors, skills, or performances a learner has acquired and can undertake at the end of a course. For example, if the objective involves changing an bicycle wheel, then enabling objectives for this would be using a spanner, unhooking the chain, preparing the patch, and so on. Table 1 is an extract from a time management course:

Table 1 Clustered Objectives

1. Define your Dreams	A. Time flies – where?	Assess your use of the resource of time	Produce life and work objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound (SMART)
	B. 'Dumb' dreams to 'SMART' goals	Identify guidelines for defining goals
2. Remove your Barriers	A. Procrastination	Identify guidelines to combat procrastination	Minimize the effects of the three most critical time wasters in work and life
	B. People	Identify guidelines to minimize interruptions from people
	C. Perfection	Identify guidelines to control a tendency toward perfectionism
3. Achieve your Goals	A. Prioritize	List the steps in converting goals into prioritized tasks	Successfully achieve key tasks that are prioritized accurately and scheduled realistically
	B. Schedule	List guidelines for effective scheduling
	C. Implement	List guidelines for successfully implementing a prioritized and scheduled task list

DIF analysis
In a DIF analysis, the objective (or groups of objectives) are analyzed in terms of difficulty, importance and frequency.

• Difficulty: the simpler the skill to be taught the better. All skills are not equal so for each we need a measure of complexity. One common measure is Bloom’s Taxonomy which rates skill complexity from 1 (knowledge) through to 6 (evaluation).
• Importance: No matter how often a skill is used, or how difficult it is, we have to ask how important that skill is to performance. A taught skill may not be used very often by the learner but it could be crucial to that learner’s job. Conversely, other skills may require constant use and re-use but may be less important in overall competency terms.
• Frequency: this simply measures how often an objective will be performed.

All three categories above can be rated on a scale of 1 – 5 from easy to hard, infrequent to frequent, less to more important and so on. Table 2 shows how a completed DIF analysis might look.

Table 2 Sample DIF analysis

Terminal Objective	Enabling Objectives	Diff.	Imp.	Freq.
Create Better Business Documents	Determine who your readers are	1	5	5
	Draft your document	2	4	5
	Write an effective letter	4	5	5
	Revise your writing	3	5	5

Prerequisites Identification
These describe what learners must be able to do before they start the course. These are often defined in terms of skills, knowledge and attitude (SKAs). When you subtract the student's previously-learned SKAs from the list of objectives, the remaining SKAs are the objectives that will need to be covered in the learning program.

More…

--