Instructional theory


An instructional theory is "a theory that offers explicit guidance on how to better help people learn and develop." It provides insights about what is likely to happen and why with respect to different kinds of teaching and learning activities while helping indicate approaches for their evaluation. Instructional designers focus on how to best structure material and instructional behavior to facilitate learning.

Development

Originating in the United States in the late 1970s, instructional theory is influenced by three basic theories in educational thought: behaviorism, the theory that helps us understand how people conform to predetermined standards; cognitivism, the theory that learning occurs through mental associations; and constructivism, the theory explores the value of human activity as a critical function of gaining knowledge. Instructional theory is heavily influenced by the 1956 work of Benjamin Bloom, a University of Chicago professor, and the results of his Taxonomy of Education Objectives—one of the first modern codifications of the learning process. One of the first instructional theorists was Robert M. Gagne, who in 1965 published Conditions of Learning for the Florida State University's Department of Educational Research.

Definition

Instructional theory is different than learning theory. A learning theory describes how learning takes place, and an instructional theory prescribes how to better help people learn. Learning theories often inform instructional theory, and three general theoretical stances take part in this influence: behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. Instructional theory helps us create conditions that increases the probability of learning. Its goal is understanding the instructional system and to improve the process of instruction.

Overview

Instructional theories identify what instruction or teaching should be like. It outlines strategies that an educator may adopt to achieve the learning objectives. Instructional theories are adapted based on the educational content and more importantly the learning style of the students. They are used as teaching guidelines/tools by teachers/trainers to facilitate learning. Instructional theories encompass different instructional methods, models and strategies.
David Merrill's First Principles of Instruction discusses universal methods of instruction, situational methods and core ideas of the post-industrial paradigm of instruction.
Universal Methods of Instruction:
Situational Methods:
based on different approaches to instruction
based on different learning outcomes:
Core ideas for the Post-industrial Paradigm of Instruction:
Four tasks of Instructional theory:
's work appears to critique instructional approaches that adhere to the knowledge acquisition stance, and his work Pedagogy of the Oppressed has had a broad influence over a generation of American educators with his critique of various "banking" models of education and analysis of the teacher-student relationship.
Freire explains, "Narration leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into "containers", into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are." In this way he explains educator creates an act of depositing knowledge in a student. The student thus becomes a repository of knowledge. Freire explains that this system that diminishes creativity and knowledge suffers. Knowledge, according to Freire, comes about only through the learner by inquiry and pursuing the subjects in the world and through interpersonal interaction.
Freire further states, "In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teacher's existence—but, unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher."
Freire then offered an alternative stance and wrote, "The raison d'etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students."
In the article, "A process for the critical analysis of instructional theory", the authors use an ontology-building process to review and analyze concepts across different instructional theories. Here are their findings: