One Standard Theme

One standard theme throughout all three chapters of “Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology” are the instructional design strategies used to improve business, P-12, and higher education. These strategies indentify the instructional goals and analyze human performance problems systematically to determine the skills involved in reaching the goals. They also identify original causes of those problems and reflect on various solutions to deal with the original causes. Finally, the strategies implement solutions to correct the problem and evaluate results of progress to see the effectiveness of the strategies as a whole. The instructional design strategies used to improve business, P-12, and higher education are systematic approaches that are more effective than unplanned preparation which leads to failure.

I believe the instructional design field is useful and has real potential to improve student’s performance. Following specific improvement strategies such as ADDIE will enhance the development of human performance improvement (HPI) and eliminate the problems faced by teachers as well as students. There are improvement strategies that our school performs well and others we can improve on. I feel our school does a great job diagnosing individuals based on data provided by standardized tests such as NWEA and MEAP. The data is used to develop individual objectives/goals that are effective for specific learners. Lessons designed around test data demonstrate knowledge about the learners, tasks reflect the objective/goal, and teaching strategies improve the effectiveness. Teachers meet throughout the year using formative evaluation procedures to revise and improve the lessons to make them as effective as possible for each learner. On the other hand, teachers in my school only meet at grade and subject level. Our school needs to improve our summative evaluation procedures by meeting as a whole school not only grade and subject level to discuss the effectiveness of the lessons after the formative stage. Teachers, as a whole school, develop new materials as well as use existing materials to improve lessons for learners across grade and subject levels. Our school has the potential to improve by learning from all instructional design strategies.