Priorities for Evaluating Instructional Material.

Taken from Florida Department of Education.

Bureau of curriculum.

Summary by Mr. Ferguson.

Research based information shows what works across disciplines   along with a few particular strategies for selected subjects and students. In this regard, two special cases for learning strategies deserve special attention:

·         The expertise reversal effect. This means that students who possess high levels of expertise in a subject do not benefit from the same strategies that work for average students or those who possess low expertise.

·         The powerful resistance to learning, which is due to students´ misconceptions in a subject area. These students require the opposite of what works for students who have high expertise

Motivational Strategies.

Instructional materials must include features to maintain learner motivation.

Features that maintain student motivation include

·         Positive expectations

·         Feedback and

·         Appearance.

Setting positive expectations

Factors that contribute to a learning climate include:

·         friendly, attentive, and encouraging communication;

·         students collaboration, assignments and group projects

·         student communication and presentations; and

·         informative feedback on student progress

The following connections improve learning:

·                            sing examples from student life, current events, and popular culture.

·                           Asking  students to share personal examples, insights, experiences  related to what they are studying.

·                          Asking students to answer self- assessment questions, to defend  positions

·                       Asking students to write personal essays, engage in role plays.

Feedback

Students are motivated by  informative feedback about  correctness, incorrectness, and how to improve  what they are learning.

Appearance

While materials should have features that make them appealing, some research has shown that students may actually find materials with flashy treatment to be dull. This happens when these types of materials provide only tidbits of information, lack integration of subject matter, and over simplify   or limit thinking.

Teaching a few big ideas

Big  ideas or major  themes provide

·         focus for students and

·         completeness

Explicit instructions

Depends upon

·                        clarity of directions and explanations, and

·                       exclusion of ambiguity.

Clarity of directions and explanations

Students benefit from knowing and practicing active learning strategies for remembering and using new information, such as:

·                         Explanations and examples  of learning  processes,

·                         directions on how  to preview, question, read or listen, reflect, recite, and review,    directions on use of learning techniques such as note taking , outlining, paraphrasing,abstracting and   analyzing,  main idea summarizing, self-coaching to reduce anxiety, imaging to relate  vocabulary words and meanings.

·                      Memory strategies and devices, and  encouragement to use persistence and personal control for learning how to learn.

Exclusion of Ambiguity

Evaluation of the explicitness of instruction includes noting that instructional materials are using phrases with ambiguous meaning, focusing directions or descriptions, and inadequate explanations