Instructional design	83

Evaluation

Stahl and Murphy’s taxonomic system is an ambitious attempt to create a framework for classifying instructional objectives, taking account of learning as well as thinking and extending from the reception of information to the creative synthesis of ideas and beliefs. The strengths of this taxonomy lie in its inclusion of affective as well as cognitive aspects of learning and its acknowledgement of the role of a system of ideas, beliefs and values in actively giving meaning to new information. However, they largely ignore social and cultural influences, do not deal with metacognition and treat feelings only as a source of additional information.

The 21 mental processes listed by Stahl and Murphy are not presented as a taxonomy and no claim is made for their completeness. However, nearly all the processes fit well within the six levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, with ‘proposing’ and ‘selecting’ being possible exceptions.

The structure of the domain of cognition is said to be hierarchical in that thinking at a particular level cannot occur unless the relevant information has been processed at all of the lower levels. In general terms this appears to be a reasonable claim, but some counterexamples may be found. It is not always the case that new explanations or solutions can only be generated within a field where knowledge is fully internalised and its use almost unconscious. Neither is it obvious that rules can never be applied to deal with new situations unless they have been permanently established in memory.

Stahl and Murphy’s hierarchical model of internalisation is not unlike that used by Krathwohl, Bloom and Masia (1964) in their taxonomy of educational objectives in the affective domain. The authors’ focus of concern in their exposition of how people learn is establishing factual and procedural knowledge in long-term memory. The most valued level of thinking is ‘generation’, which is described as being the synthesis of rules understood as abstractions (such as Hegel’s dialectic) and said to be ‘a very sophisticated mental operation not utilised by most persons’ (Stahl and Murphy, 1981, p. 34). This statement suggests an elitist, academically-biased value system.

84 Frameworks for Thinking

The illustrative instructional objectives are expressed at a general level and leave the teacher or instructional designer with a formidable task if the system is intended for daily use in planning lessons. In view of its complexity, teachers will find the system impractical for monitoring the developing understanding of individual students, but they may derive value from Stahl and Murphy’s description of how learners transform, internalise, organise, use and generate ideas. However, the terminology they use is far from simple and is certainly not accessible to students. Communicability is not assisted by the use of technical terms such as ‘literation’ and ‘encoding’, the neologism ‘transfersion’ and specially defined meanings, such as those for ‘adaptation’ and ‘extracting’.

Throughout, these authors tend to reduce all content to information and rules, failing to provide a convincing account of attitudes, beliefs and systems. There is also a certain rigidity in their belief in a hierarchy of levels of thinking.

Summary: Stahl and Murphy

Purpose and				Relevance for
structure		Some key features		teachers and learning
Main purpose(s):		Terminology:		Intended audience:
•	to help teachers and	•	not easy to grasp	• teachers and
	teacher-educators	•	uses specially defined	teacher-educators
	understand thinking		technical terms
	and learning
•	a tool for use in
	instructional design
	and teaching
Domains addressed:		Presentation:		Contexts:
•	cognitive	•	the complexity of	• education
•	affective (but only		lists, tables and
	as a source of information)		graphics is offputting