42 Frameworks for Thinking

Guilford’s structure of intellect model

Guilford’s objects of study were ‘intellectual factors’, which he sorted along three dimensions: operation, product and content (Guilford, 1967). Each of these dimensions was subdivided into a hierarchy. So, for instance, product comprises units, classes, relations, systems, transformations and implications, with unit at the lowest level. Subdivisions in the other dimensions gave rise to a cube with space for 120 kinds of intellectual factor. This three-dimensional structure has greater precision than Bloom’s taxonomy, but seems to have found less favour amongst educators, possibly due to its greater size. It fits the description of a typology.

Gerlach and Sullivan’s taxonomy

For Gerlach and Sullivan, the objects of study were not educational objectives or intellectual factors but observable behaviours. They listed hundreds of learning behaviours and sorted them empirically into six categories (Gerlach and Sullivan, 1967). These categories were then placed in order of increasing complexity of behaviour: identify, name, describe, construct, order, and demonstrate. Gerlach and Sullivan point out that this is not a rigorous hierarchy and their groups do not, strictly speaking, form a true taxonomy. Further, creative production and transfer are not included. Gerlach and Sullivan see it more as a meaningful checklist to help educators ensure adequate provision for these behaviours and this gives it its utility.

Conclusion

Lists, simple groups and comprehensive, related groups (in taxonomies and typologies) impose order on a field of study. They can be economical, descriptive devices with some potential to support thought and action. Just how much potential depends on their nature, how exhaustive they are, how relevant they are to the task in hand, and how readily they can be related to the observed world. The examples serve to warn us that:

1.not everything called a taxonomy is a taxonomy

2.categories may not be mutually exclusive

Lists, inventories, groups, taxonomies and frameworks	43

3.definitions of categories may be vague, making classification difficult

4.classifiers are not always consistent in their application of sorting principles

5.the structures may not be entirely sound

6.small structures (linear and with fewer categories) can be easier to grasp and use but this gain can be at the expense of content validity

7.large structures (several dimensions and with many categories) can be more precise, but this gain can be at the expense of meaningfulness and ease of use.

In spite of their shortcomings, such structures can be useful to the practitioner (e.g. the teacher, test developer, programme constructor) and the researcher (e.g. in education and in educational psychology). Which are useful depends on how well they fit the task or suit their purpose.

3

Frameworks dealing with instructional design

Introduction
Every instructional design system is underpinned in some way or
other by a theory of learning and a way of ‘knowing’ or ‘seeing’ the
world. While learning theory describes and attempts to explain how
people learn, the main aim of instructional design is to provide
guidance on the practical task of designing learning experiences.
Placing instructional design theorists on an epistemological con-
tinuum, behaviourist systems lie towards the positivist end of the
scale and the post-modernist concern with critical theory at the
opposite pole. Nearer the centre, but still on the positivist side, are
the cognitivists, with their combination of positivism and interpret-
ation. Close by, but nearer to the post-modern end of the scale, are
the constructivists, with their orientation towards interpretation and
criticism. While ‘behavioural objectivists’ see learning largely in terms
of response strengthening, ‘cognitivists’ tend to explain it in terms of
knowledge acquisition, and ‘constructivists’ construe learning in terms
of the dialogic generation of ‘constructions’.
It is interesting to note that it was the more behaviouristic branches
of instructional design which held most immediate appeal for the
early–mid twentieth-century industrialists and educational policy-
makers. One of the most popular branches of this approach to in-
structional design became known as ‘programmed instruction’. This
reached its peak in the 1960s – 70s, a period when linear and branch-
ing programmes were designed for teaching machines. Hawley
(1967, p. 277) echoes the dominant ideology of the time where he
identifies the centrality of behaviourism to early instructional design
in terms of the importance of ‘preparing the material to be learned	44

Instructional design	45

in such a way as it can be presented to the learner in a series of carefully planned sequential steps’. According to this approach to instructional design, these steps progress from simple to more complex levels of instruction and the student is tested after each step to measure competence. Knowledge and skills are seen as carefully designed, deconstructed objects, which can be programmed into the learner’s head.

Early twenty-first-century systems of state education in the West are generally based on highly-prescribed programmes of instruction, which aim to prepare children for a world of work and shape the minds of the existing workforce in line with shifting political and economic priorities (Brown, 2002). It is important to note, however, that behaviouristic assumptions have been challenged from within the instructional design community itself. The dominant approach among educational technologists is now a cognitivist one. Educational theorists who concern themselves more with teacher-mediated than with computer-mediated instruction most commonly believe that learners actively construct meaning and acknowledge a debt to Piaget and/or Vygotsky. Feuerstein was one of the earliest to create an instructional system in which Vygotsky’s ideas about socially and culturally mediated learning were combined with ideas about cognitive structure and function.

A towering figure in the field of instructional design is Benjamin Bloom, who set out to classify educational goals (or instructional objectives) across the cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains. By drawing attention to outcomes which require different kinds of thinking (especially ‘higher-order’ thinking), he and his colleagues hoped to influence curriculum design by ensuring that educators operate in ways which are likely to instil qualities such as intellectual honesty, creativity, independence of mind and personal integrity. Bloom’s influence is evident in many of the frameworks included in this book, and his cognitive domain taxonomy has been recently updated and extended by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001).

What all of the frameworks in this chapter have in common is that they are intended to influence classroom practice, by focusing attention on instructional goals, which always include, but are not confined to, the gathering of information and the building of

46 Frameworks for Thinking

understanding. These goals range from simple to complex, from specific to very broad and from short-term to long-term. They may extend across more than one domain of experience and they may or may not cover goals expressed in terms of metacognition and self-regulation.

Our grouping of frameworks into families inevitably leads to overlap. Productive thinking goals and broad aims about desirable ‘habits of mind’ or dispositions are cases in point, since these appear in every one of our families. Neverthess, we believe that there is some value in comparing like with like. Instructional design frameworks are intended for use in curriculum planning and assessment as well as at the level of a single lesson. These framework designers are influenced by pragmatic more than academic concerns and all write with teachers in mind. Instructional design is a field in which both educators and educational psychologists have been active, and that balance is reflected here.

Teachers and instructors can only benefit from advances in theory and knowledge about how we think and learn. However, instructional designers compete in their attempts to describe how and why their particular approach to instructional design works. They offer different perspectives on the learning process and make different assumptions about how to engender learning. Each is supported by differing degrees of empirical evidence. Yet the exercise of comparing them reveals similarities as well as differences and may help achieve new syntheses. It may well be the case, as Gagne´ (1985) argued, that different kinds of learning are best achieved in different ways.

Although some systems of instructional design appear to have been developed to be ‘teacher-proof ’, all of them rely upon teachers and instructors to put them into practice. If teachers and instructors don’t understand them, or if the learning theory upon which they are based is underdeveloped or inappropriate, they are unlikely to have a positive influence upon teaching, training and learning.

The following section of this chapter offers a review of 13 instructional design frameworks and shows how the intentions of different instructional designers have operated to influence the design and utility of respective systems.