Instructional Design and the Curriculum Development Process

1 WALTER DICKI nstructional Designand the CurriculumDevelopment ProcessFor Curriculum designed for numerouspresentations by a variety of instructors,a systems approach offers schools acost-effective, integrated Process alreadyused by the military, corporations, andthird-world Process for improving studentachievement through the sys-tematic Design , Development ,and evaluation of instruction is cur-rently available but not widely used bythe public schools. The Process isreferred to as the systems approach,and those who use it are usually re-ferred to as Instructional InstructionalDesign ProcessThe "systems approach" label indi-cates that a set of interrelated proce-dures is used to achieve a predeter-mined outcome. The Process includesa feedback loop that indicates the ex-tent to which the instruction has beeneffective and how it might be is no single systems and Goodson (1980) haveindicated that at least 40 different mod-els have been documented in the liter-ature However, the models have astriking degree of similarity.

2 Figure 1is based primarily on the commonelements identified by Andrews PerspectiveThe general systems approach firstbecame well known to the publicwhen it was applied to the develop-ment of large weapons systems bymilitary contractors in the 1950s. How-ever, the term was not used in educa-tion until 10 to 20 years later. The '60ssaw the emergence of the componentsthat eventually would be combined tobecome the Instructional Design sys-tems approach. Interestingly enough,a number of these components werethe direct result of work done onvarious Curriculum Glaser and researchers at theUniversity of Pittsburgh were amongthe first to develop individualized in-structional packages for elementarychildren. As they developed instruc-tional objectives, Glaser became awareof the necessity of including test itemsthat directly measured the behaviorsdescribed in the objectives. This proc-ess of matching test items to objectivesbecame known as criterion-refer-enced testing and is a key componentof the systems Gagne was a consultant tothe Maryland Mathematics Projectwhen he developed his proceduresfor identifying learning than accepting a list of skills thatmight have been identified by a sub-ject-matter specialist, for each statedinstructional goal Gagne asked thequestion, 'What does the student haveto know or be able to do in order tolearn to perform the instructionalgoal?

3 " The answer was the identifica-tion of several subordinate skills that,when combined with additional in-struction, would lead the student tothe Instructional goal. This Process isrepeated for each subordinate skilluntil basic knowledge and skills areidentified. The result is a learninghierarchy that indicates the skills thatshould be included in the instructionand the sequence in which theyshould be presented. The hierarchicalanalysis is one of several analytic tech-niques that designers use to identifywhat should be included in an instruc-tional basic component of the sys-tems approach is the use of formativeevaluation to collect data from stu-dents to find out what types of revi-sions should be made in the instruc-tion. A number of educationalresearchers became concerned whileevaluating the effectiveness of themultimillion dollar science curricu-lums produced by universities andresearch and Development centers inthe early 1960s.

4 Lee Cronbach, MichaelScriven, and others found that many ofthese products were only effectivewith the most capable students. Theyasked why the effects of the instructionwere not determined before the mate-rials had been published and used inthe classroom. Couldn't there be someearlier form of evaluation that wouldidentify these problems and suggestalternative solutions that could be test-ed? The answer to this query was theconcept of formatir evaluation-acontinuing revision Process that is em-EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIPI ployed as Curriculum is being devel-oped. This Process is used not to judgethe effectiveness of the instruction butrather to provide information to thedevelopers as to how they can makethe instruction more of thesystems ApproachAlthough many components of the sys-tems approach to the Design of in-struction were developed in conjunc-tion with public school curriculumefforts, the largest users of the ap-proach today are undoubtedly the mil-itary, business, and industry.

5 Thereappear to be several reasons for its useby these groups.* Behaviorally stated instructionalgoals can be identified and It is critical that all learners masterwhatever tasks they must country's defense or a company'sprofits depend on people who can dotheir jobs.* Business, industry, and the mili-tary can afford the large start-up coststhat frequently are required when thesystems approach is used. (Any curric-ulum Development Process is expen-sive, however, if the resulting curricu-lum is ineffective.)* Public schools typically have notemployed persons who are trained todevelop Curriculum materials. Like-wise, teachers typically have not hadeither the time or the training to en-gage in large-scale Curriculum devel-opment these factors, it is still enlight-ening to examine several situations inwhich Instructional designers havebeen involved in developing instruc-tion for public schools. At the mostelementary level are those efforts I seeeach semester when I teach graduateclasses in Instructional Design .

6 Thestudents, who usually include practic-ing classroom teachers, are requiredto develop a one-hour self-instruction-al module. They proceed through theentire Process , from identifying an in-structional goal to developing testsand Instructional materials to tryingout the instruction with students. Theyrevise their package, try it out with alarger group, and write a report docu-menting procedures and results of this effort are highlypredictable. First, the teacher- Design -ers almost always report large learninggains by students on their criterion-referenced post-tests. Often studentperformance far exceeds what theteachers had been able to accomplishin the past with other approaches. Theother result is the inevitable statement"I'll never be the same teacher again!"Even experienced teachers often gaininsights into their students' abilitiesand the learning Process that they hadnot realized through their complete contrast to the one-hour modules constructed by novicedesigners is the application of systemstechniques to large projects, such asthe redesign of the Republic of Korea'spublic school system (Morgan 1981).

7 Ateam of educators was funded by theAgency for International Developmentto work with their South Korean coun-terparts to analyze the educatiorAl sys-tem and its impact on other aspects ofsociety. A sector analysis identified theneed for changes especially at theelementary and middle school systems approach was used todesign schooling that would not costmore in resources and would servethe postwar technological needs of thecountry by making effective instruc-tion more widely Korean government establisheda new organization to implement thecountry's educational reform, the Ko-rean Educational Development Insti-tute, which was responsible for devel-oping an entirely new Curriculum andfor training teachers in its use. In a ten-year follow-up study of this extensiveproject, the Agency for InternatkonalDevelopment found that even thoughthe student population had grown,student performance had inTceedfrom 20 to 40 percent on the variouscontent tests.

8 The Agency cornsidersthis to be one of its most successfiuleducational projects and has funded aconsortium led by Bob Morgan, direc-tor of the Korean project, to imple-ment the same approach in a numberof third-world projects I have described exem-plify the range of applications of thesystems approach A teacher can devel-op a small package to meet a specificinstructional need, or a group of spe-cialists can analyze and develop a newsystem for an entire country. Mostapplications today fall somewhere be-tween these two Systems ApproachApplied to CurriculumDevelopmentThe Instructional Design Process isbeginning to make an impact on thecurriculum of public schools in theUnited States. Over a decade ago, Er-nest Burkman employed the processto create the Individualized ScienceInstructional System textbooks thatare used in many high schoolsthroughout the Many of the majorcomponents of the systems approachprlocess were used in this project,sponsored by the National ScienceFoundation, as the- were in a numberiu", minwmuin& -wit~~~~~~~~iai -=~u& is "I V d 7a Uw JF C : -*ldl -* -;~MMMTo be acold_.

9 , Xr Nln____ _ -r~a _kf:~r~-- _ -_ptr is d _:*a Ad x~: FSC I _ _s _tmg h _ _Ernle-min~rmm timns. The uarewmr h 'msl~lthat wIN be pmssmind oenw a mIoetfi~ 1. ThbIm ~ mDEcEMBER 1986 JANUARY 1987of other federally funded curriculumprojects at that state legislatures have re-quired textbook publishers to adopt atleast one component of the systemsapproach-formative evaluation. Thestate requires publishers to demon-strate that they have formatively evalu-ated a text before it is offered year textbook publishers inFlorida submit Learner Verificationand Revisions Reports (as the forma-tive evaluation Process is referred toin the Florida legislation) to the De-partment of Education. An analysis ofsome of these reports (Dick 1986)indicates that few publishers are usinga systems approach to develop texts,and that many do not even gather datafrom student tryouts to revise the textsprior to their publication.

10 In publicmeetings, publishers' representativesoffer various reasons for the quality ofreports they submit. However, statetextbook councils have begun to rejectany texts that are not accompanied bysatisfactory formative evaluation re-ports. Other states are watching withinterest the publishers' reactions tothe Florida with the procedure pub-lishers normally use to develop a text,the systems approach brings morepeople into the Process and costsmore money-a cost that would pre-sumably be passed on to the texts are written by one or moresubject-matter specialists who workwith the editorial staff of the publish-ing company. Publishers assume thatthe writers are familiar with the char-acteristics of the learners who will usethe text. They assume, in fact, that asthe authors are writing they are tryingout the materials with the learners. Insome situations this is a fair assump-tion. However, most writers do nothave access to the support staff or therange of students needed to effectivelytry out and revise may be argued that it is not thepublishers' responsibility to producetexts that teach but rather only toassemble factually correct informa-tion.