Elements of Instruction

The last two years I've spent a lot of time researching on the effects instructional events in Computer based learning.

Gagné and Driscoll (1988) defined instruction as “the set of events designed to initiate, activate and support learning in a human learner.” Furthermore Gagné et al. (1992) defined it as "a deliberately arranged set of external events designed to support the learning process."

I prefered to call these events as elements of instruction and the ones that I researched on were Objectives, Practice with feedback, Examples and Review. In my investigation in a couple of experimental studies, I found that Practice was one element that had the most effect. Not that the others weren't useful, but just with the presence of practice the effects of the other elements were minimized. So I have become this big advocate for designing Practice in any instructional material.

If you would like to read more about my studies, I would love to share them with you. I have a couple of conference presentations and one journal article - with the other on the way. I thoroughly enjoyed the research process, even though I was disappointed when I heard from reviewers "what is new in your study?", they did not get the point that I investigated a combination of elements in a single study which not a lot of others have done.

To sum the studies in a single sentence, it was a research in depth and not too wide. What can you benefit from research if you do not include the main instructional elements in a module but test for the all the other external variables which might add on to it...........