Designing Effective Instruction by Morrison, Ross, & Kemp,
chapter 4

You will need one traditional spring type mousetrap for an exercise this week. You can purchase one at most hardware and grocery stores. 

We started our design process by identifying an instructional problem using needs assessment, goal analysis, or performance assessment, or some combination of these tools. The problem identification process narrowed our focus to one or more specific topics that we need teach to achieve our goals. We also have a clear picture of our target audience including the knowledge and skills they bring to our classroom. Our next step is to determine what knowledge and skills we must teach to solve the instructional problem. This step is probably the most critical one in the design process. If we cannot determine the knowledge and skills the learner needs, then we can hardly design lesson plans or media for teaching.

Task analysis is the process instructional designers use to determine the content to include in the instruction. It is our way of limiting the information needed to just the information our learner needs to achieve the goals and alleviate the instructional problem.

This week, you will learn three different task analysis methods. Jonassen, Tessmer, and Hannum have identified 28 different methods in their book, Task analysis methods for instructional design [published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in 1999]. We have different methods to use with different types of tasks. For example, consider the difference between learning how to identify soybeans, dry edible beans, and corn versus how to mix an herbicide. Identifying different types of beans and corn requires the learner to understand the attributes of each category so that when presented with either field corn or sweet corn, the learner will correctly identify both as corn. Mixing an herbicide would require a calculation of chemical strength and then a series of psychomotor tasks for safely mixing the herbicide. We have different methods of analysis for each of these types of knowledge.

This first reading focuses on the process of topic analysis, which is a process of analyzing knowledge. For example, the table of contents to a textbook is an example of very brief topic analysis.

As you read this section of the course textbook, note the six different categories of knowledge described on pages 80-82. Can you identify an example of each of these six structures from courses you have had or might teach? Second, what questions might you ask a subject-matter expert to start the topic analysis?

Read pages 76-84 in the class text Designing Effective Instruction.

One procedure for developing a topic analysis is presented on pages 82-83. First, we identified the broad topics (nails, screws, and bolts). Then, we gathered information about each of the topics—drilling down, so to speak, for more detail. Topic analyses are often presented in a traditional outline format as illustrated.

Through a very strange set of circumstances, it seems that you will be teaching drivers education to a group of high school students this summer. Your goal for the first day is to orient the learners to the car's features from the driver's seat.

1. Create a topic analysis of the key features of the car the learner could see or use from the driver's seat.
2. Try doing your topic analysis first, then, you can read our topic analysis here.
3. A good question to use to start your topic analysis is "What does the learner need to know about ___?"
    

Our next step is to gather more information about the content in our topic analysis. For example, we could take the switch for the headlights. It has three positions: off, parking lights, and headlights. Once we have identified these three options, we would need information on parking lights and headlights. As we do this additional analysis, we "discover" there is another switch for the high-beam lights.

Our analysis would continue until we have broken the content down to a level our target audience could understand. For example, if we were preparing this lesson to introduce new car sales personnel to a new model, simply giving the location of the light switch would probably be adequate. However, for a new driver we would need more detail (e.g., parking lights and headlights), as they are probably naïve to the difference between the two sets of lights.

Select three different topics in your analysis from Exercise 1 and provide additional detail. Post your results to the discussion board for this exercise, and then compare your analysis to that of two other students. How do they compare in terms of detail? Do you need to do more or less analysis?
 

Another type of content we must often analyze deals with how to perform a procedure or series of steps. This series of steps can be a psychomotor task such stacking hay in a barn, or they can be cognitive (i.e., mental) steps used to calculate the amount of antibiotic to give a sick bull. 

As you read pages 84-91, consider the following questions. First, how do topic analysis and procedure analysis differ? Second, would you approach the analysis of a psychomotor process such as teaching someone how to give a rabbit an injection differ from determining the amount of paint needed to paint the outside of a barn? Third, what questions could you use to start a procedural analysis?
 

Pest management is an integral part of any agricultural operation large or small. For this exercise, you are to do a procedural analysis for how to bait and set a traditional mousetrap. 

Do your analysis first, then, compare your analysis to ours. Check our analysis here. What are the differences?

One important aspect of a procedural analysis is identifying the cues. The most common types of cues are visual, auditory, and tactile.

Visual cues provide the expert with feedback about the process. For example, when you press the start button on your microwave oven, the timer will start to count down giving us a cue that all is fine. If it flashes or nothing happens, then we know that either we forgot to enter a cooking time or it is broken. 

Similarly, auditory cues provide us with feedback on the status of our procedural step. When you close the door to the microwave oven or to your car, a properly shut door gives a specific, recognizable sound. If we do not hear the sound, then we tend to slam the door again! If we hear a constant siren sound from the smoke alarm, then we know we have something burning. However, if it is an occasional beep we know that it is time to replace the battery. 

Tactile cues are easily overlooked as they are not visible to the instructional designer and are often second nature to the subject-matter expert. For example, consider how you lock the dead bolt on your door. How do you lock the dead bolt? Did you remember to turn the key counterclockwise until it will turn no more, or did you just say to turn it counterclockwise? If you were teaching a Martian who is used to voice activated locks, you would need to tell it how far to turn the key, or stop when resistance is felt. Otherwise the Martian might break the key off due to excessive force! 

There are other types of cues that can make the difference between a procedural analysis and a good procedure analysis. One cue is orientation. That is, is the object pointing up, down, left, or right? Is the object above, below, or level with another object? When you turn the object, which direction do you turn it? When you are finished turning the object, what is its orientation? For example, if you are turning the choke on a lawn mower, is it turned left or right? Does the arrow on the choke button point to the word CHOKE?
 

Now, recheck your analysis of how to bait and set the mousetrap. Identify cues for as many steps as possible. Next, have someone go through the motions of baiting the trap as you read your steps. Did you include all the steps and cues? What was missing? If you missed some information, how could you improve your analysis for the next time?

The third type of analysis we will discuss is focused on interpersonal communications. When we analyze a task like painting a ceiling, it is a task that is repeated with approximately the same steps every time. Of course, there are some variations, but the majority of the steps are very similar. 

In contrast, interpersonal communications vary each time depending upon the personalities of the people involved as well as the conditions or environment in which they occur. Consider for example, a car sales person. First thing this morning is the elderly grandmother who just wants a car, no haggle, and let her drive it away. Then, at noon, a young couple enters the sales room with reams of paper they have printed from the Internet research that covers every piece of information about the car as well as five different invoices for the dealer's price. 

The sales person will approach the selling process of these two customers quite differently. "Madam, I am going to give you top dollar of $3500 for your car so you can drive the new one home today" (knowing he can sell her slightly used car for $10,000 this weekend). Versus, "Well, those invoices on the Internet are wrong because those folks do not have access to Ford's prices."

We need a different approach for analyzing interpersonal communications than we use for a procedural task. As you read pages 91-105, consider the following questions.

1. How would you determine how to teach others to deal with an irate parent upset over a student's grade?
2. How does procedural analysis differ from critical incident analysis?
3. Provide three examples of how you might use critical incident analysis in a course you might teach.
4. How can you avoid some of the problems of being both the instructional designer and the subject-matter expert?
5. Describe how you could use the techniques on pages 94-95 for conducting a task analysis.

At sometime in our lives, we have done something that upset a friend or colleague. Then, we had to talk with this person and straighten things out. Do a critical incident analysis with two other people asking them to describe how they resolved the problem. Once you have completed the two interviews, identify actions they took that you feel are critical to the task at hand.

If you were to follow through with the analysis and instruction, your next step would be to conduct a procedural analysis of each action to identify how to do the action.

Read page 405-407 (appendix). Can you identify examples of a topic analysis and examples of procedure analysis in this task analysis? Jot down some of these examples before checking our response.

This week you should conduct a complete task analysis for your final project. Your analysis could be a mix of information from students' textbook and your knowledge. It will include all the instructional information you plan to teach in your unit.

In this lesson you have learned three different methods for conducting a task analysis. They are three tools in your toolbox that you will use some more often than others.

For example, if you are teaching a course on agricultural economics, the majority of your analysis might depend on a topic analysis. A course teaching horse shoeing and farriering would depend more on procedural analysis since the course focus is on developing a number of psychomotor skills. A course on pest management might include topic analyses for identifying different types of pests and procedural analyses for mixing and applying pesticides.

For most courses, you will find that a mix of analyses is needed to identify the content. Most courses will include both topic and procedural analyses.