A Brief History of Instructional Design

A Brief History of Instructional Design

Douglas Leigh



As a formal discipline, Instructional Systems Design has been a long time in the making. The early contributions of thinkers such as Aristotle, Socrates and Plato regarding the cognitive basis of learning and memory was later expanded by the 13th century philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas who discussed the perception of teachings in terms of free will. Four hundred years later, John Locke advanced Aristotle's notion of human's initial state of mental blankness by proposing that almost all reason and knowledge must be gained from experience. Then, at the turn of the 20th century John Dewey presented several tenets of the philosophy of education which promoted the idea that learning occurs best when married with doing, rather than rote regurgitation of facts.
As the 1920's approached, a behaviorist approach to educational psychology became increasingly predominant. Thorndike's theory of connectionism represents the original stimulus-response (S-R) model of behavioral psychology, and was expanded on some twenty years later by Hull in his exposition of drive reduction – a motivational model of behavior which emphasizes learner's wants, attention, and activities. With the Industrial Revolution came an increased attention to productivity, and educational behaviorists during the 1920's such as Sidney Pressey applied mechanized technology to increase the efficiency of the learning process. Though their initial incarnation did not see much use after the Depression, many of the lessons learned research into these teaching machines regarding the delivery of standardized instruction contributed to the instructional media research & development movement of World War II.
The advent of the Second World War presented a tremendous instructional dilemma: the rapid training of hundreds of thousands of military personnel. Ralph Tyler's work a decade before WWII indicated that objectives were most useful to instructional developers if written in terms of desired learner behaviors. Armed with this knowledge and the experience of creating standardize methods of instructional delivery using teaching machines, military researchers developed a bevy of training films and other mediated materials for instructional purposes. In part, the United States' heavy investment in training and R&D was credited with the country's victory in the war. With the economic boom that followed, federal dollars followed researcher's desire to better flesh out the underpinnings of learning, cognition, and instruction.
The 1950's are characterized by a shift away from the uninformed application of instructional technology to the formulation of theoretical models of learning. The publication of B. F. Skinner's The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching in 1954 canonized the basic behaviorist principles of S-R, feedback, and reinforcement. As the key element of his theory of operant conditioning, the reinforcement of desired learner responses was also incorporated into Skinner's implementations of programmed instruction. Considered by many the progenitor of contemporary instructional design, programmed instruction emphasizes the formulation of behavioral objectives, breaking instructional content into small units and rewarding correct responses early and often.
Another substantial instructional theorist of the 1950's was Benjamin Bloom. His 1956 taxonomy of intellectual behaviors provided instructors a means by which to decide how to impart instructional content to learners most effectively. Advocating a mastery approach to learning, Bloom endorsed instructional techniques that varied both instruction and time according to learner requirements. While this approach provided instructional developers a means by which to match subject matter and instructional methods, Bloom's taxonomy was not in and of itself capable of satisfying the desire of large organizations to relate resources and processes to the performances of individuals. To achieve this researchers in the military's Air Research and Development Command borrowed from Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory of biological interactions to integrate the operations of a wide range of departments, such as training, intelligence, and staffing. Combined with the Bloom's Taxonomy, the systems approach to instructional and organizational development allowed planners and policy-makers to match the content and delivery of instruction in a fashion which considered both super- and sub-systems (the organization as a whole, as well as groups and individuals within the organization). These advances of Skinner, Bloom and von Bertalanffy were usually employed to develop instruction in what was only assumed to be an effective an efficient manner. The formalization of a standardized design process still had yet to be devised.
Again it was a crisis that spurred the next evolution of instructional technology – a shift away from an emphasis in the development of instructional programs to one which focused on the design of entire curriculum. Again the crisis was a war, but this time the war was a political one. In 1957 the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite and began the "space race". America was taken by surprise and the government was forced to reevaluate the education system and its shortcomings. Science and math programs were the first to be targeted, and the government employed experts in these fields to bring the content up to date.
In 1962 Robert Glaser synthesized the work of previous researchers and introduced the concept of "instructional design", submitting a model which links learner analysis to the design and development of instruction. Interestingly, Glaser's contribution to the current field of instructional systems is not so much in the advancement of his model, but in work concerning Individually Prescribed Instruction (IPI), an approach whereby the results of a learner's placement test are used to plan learner-specific instruction.
At the same time Glaser was developing his theories of instructional design and IPI, Robert Mager published his treatise on the construction of performance objectives. Mager suggested that an objective should describe in measurable terms who an objective targets, the behavior they will have exhibited, the conditions or limitations under which they must carry out this behavior, and the criteria against which their behavior will be gauged.
As early as 1962 when he published "Military Training and Principles of Learning" Robert Gagné demonstrated a concern for the different levels of learning. His differentiation of psychomotor skills, verbal information, intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, and attitudes provides a companion to Bloom's six cognitive domains of learning. Later, Gagné extended his thinking to include nine instructional events that detail the conditions necessary for learning to occur. These events have long since been used for the basis for the design of instruction and the selection of appropriate media.
The mediation of instruction entered the computer age in the 1960's when Patrick Suppes conducted his initial investigations into computer-assisted instruction (CAI) at Stanford University. Developed through a systematic analysis of curriculum, Suppes' CAI provided learner feedback, branching, and response tracking – aspects were later incorporated into the PLATO system in the 1970's and continue guide the development of today's instructional software.
By the late 1960's America was again in crisis. Not only was the country involved in another war, but the nation's schools were unable to elicit the achievement from learners it anticipated. Grant Venn argued that since only 19% of first graders complete a bachelor or arts degree, that the current educational system is only serving the advantaged minority of schoolchildren. To counter this trend Robert Morgan proposed to conduct an experiment with an "organic curriculum" which would to incorporate into the educational system the best instructional practices identified through research. Accepted in 1967 the proposal by the US Office of Education, the project was dubbed "Educational Systems for the 1970's", or ES'70. Morgan engaged an array of experts in the field of learning, cognition, and instructional design to contribute to the project and carried out multiple experiments in a variety of settings. Of these was Leslie Briggs, who had demonstrated that an instructionally designed course could yield up to 2:1 increase over conventionally designed courses in terms of achievement, reduction in variance, and reduction of time-to-completion – this effect was four times that of the control group which received no training. In 1970, Morgan partnered with the Florida Research and Development Advisory Board to conduct a nation-wide educational reform project in South Korea. Faced with the task of increasing the achievement of learners while at the same time reducing the cost of schooling from $41.27 per student per year Morgan applied some of the same techniques as had been piloted in the ES'70 project and achieved striking results: an increase in student achievement, a more efficient organization of instructors and course content, an increased teacher to student ratio, a reduction in salary cost, and a reduction in yearly per student cost by $9.80.
Around this time Roger Kaufman developed a problem-solving framework for educational strategic planning which provided practitioners a means by which to demonstrate value-added not only for the learner, but the school system and society as a whole. This framework provided the basis for the Organizational Elements Model (OEM), a needs assessment model which specifies results to be achieved at societal, organizational, and individual performance levels. By rigorously defining needs as gaps in results Kaufman emphasized that performance improvement interventions can not demonstrate return-on-investment unless those interventions were derived from the requirements of these three primary clients and beneficiaries of organizational action. This approach to needs assessment and strategic planning has since been used across the world as the foundation for planning, evaluation, and continuous improvement in military, business, and educational settings.
A variety of models for instructional system design proliferated the late 1970's and early 80's: Gagné and Briggs, Branson, Dick and Carey, and Atkins, to name a few. One possible reason for this phenomenon deals with the establishment of formal education and training departments within both public and private organizations. Faced with the computerized technologies of the times, these organizations require a means by which to quickly develop appropriate methods by which to educate internal employees in the new business practices ushered into existence by the Information Age. Another explanation is that businesses, especially consulting organizations, are becoming increasingly required to demonstrate value-added not only to their organization, but to the clients they serve. The evaluation and continuous improvement components of contemporary models of ISD make far strides from the early develop-and-implement models of the middle of the century in this aspect.
In the 1990's a dual focus on technology and performance improvement has developed. For example, in his 1988 essay "Why the Schools Can't Improve: The Upper Limit Hypothesis" Robert Branson offers an argument for systemic school reform, suggesting that schools are operating at near peak efficiency and must be redesigned from the top down using technological interventions. Later in that year Branson was contracted by the Florida Department of Education (DOE) to analyze it's various programs and plan a system-wide technology-based educational reform initiative for Florida called Schoolyear 2000. Over the next several years Branson's team developed and piloted multiple computerized instructional technologies, as well as models of the interaction between the internal operations of the school system and the experiences and knowledge of students, parents, and teachers.
Developments in performance improvement outside ISD during the 1990's such as Quality Management (QM), Organizational Engineering, and Change Management have required that instructional designers look outside their profession to demonstrate the utility of their practice. Introduced earlier by Deming, QM has swept public and private organizations alike in the 90's. Whereas initially thought of in terms of "quality control" or "zero defects", quality practices have evolved into tools for organizational continuous improvement. Similarly, instructional designers in the 90's often work alongside authorities in the field of organizational engineering. Characterized by a concern for an organization's culture and interaction between groups, organizational engineering seeks to improve organizations through the identification of relationships between an organization's vision, mission, goals, methods and personnel. Similarly, change management has become a business in and of itself, with leaders such as Darly Conner and Joel Barker pioneering methods for and models of organizational change.
The advent of new media, such as the Internet and hypermedia, has brought about not only technological innovations, but also coupled these with new ways of approaching learning and instruction. As opposed to the behavioralist perspective that emphasizes learning objectives, the constructivist approach holds that learners construct their understanding of reality from interpretations of their experiences. Theorists such as Thomas Duffy and Seymour Papert suggest that constructivism provides a model whereby socio-cultural and cognitive issues regarding the design of learning environments can be supported by computer tools. This philosophy has been applied to such computerized technologies as online help systems and programming language LOGO.
In the future, instructional designers are likely to choose one of two paths: specialist or generalist. In the prior path, designers will focus on one aspect of learning or instruction and act as consultants or subject matter experts, whether internal or external to the organization. The other approach is one more aligned with managerial activities. Since the field is becoming too broad for most designers to work with authority in all matters, this option allows practitioners to oversee the development of instructional projects, rather than narrow their efforts exclusively on assessment, analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation or continuous improvement.
References
Boling, E. (1996). Instructional Technology Foundations I: Historical Timelines Project Page [Online]. Available: http://education.indiana.edu/~istcore/r511/datelist.html [1998, June 7].
Kearsley, G. (1994). Learning & Instruction: The TIP Database [Online]. Available: http://www.lincoln.ac.nz/educ/tip/1.htm [1998, June 7].
Reiser, R. A. (1987). Instructional Technology: A History. In R. M. Gagné (ed.), Instructional Technology: Foundations (pp. 11 - 40). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Shrock, S. A. (No date). A Brief History of Instructional Development [Online].Available: http://uttc-med.utb.edu/6320/chapters/summary_ch2.html [1998, June 7].