Instructional Design Principles
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Overview
Instructional Design Principle: Practice Principles (4:00)
Description
Practice in e-Learning incorporates interactions through questions. When creating questions for interactions, creators must keep in mind that the questions being asked should allow learners to be both behaviourally and psychologically active. Learners should be given a chance to actively apply their knowledge rather than just regurgitating answers. The practice must be deliberate. Any type of practice offered to learners should be relevant to their jobs, dispensed all over their learning space and be offered frequently as it leads to improvement. Six practice principles are set as guidelines for creators of web-based learning tools.
Guidelines for Use
Practice Principle 1 – Sufficient Practice Interactions
There should be enough practice assignments for learners to help them learn without overloading them with repetitive types of questions. Since the benefit of practice reduces over time it is not helpful to bombard students with the same types of practice questions and/or questions with the same content, and it is not a good use of their time. One way this can be accomplished is to give the students a choice regarding how many questions they wish to practice. If they feel like they have sufficient knowledge of the concept then they can choose to move on.
Practice Principle 2 – Mirror the Job
The interactions provided must have job-realistic content. It is important to avoid only knowledge-based questions and should include application questions where learners can respond to scenarios that might happen in real-life at their job. An example of this is a nursing simulation used by nursing students to help them understand daily circumstances that might occur. A link to that website is provided below.
Practice Principle 3 – Provide Effective Feedback
The feedback provided should include relevant explanations – especially when the answer is incorrect. Learners must understand why the answer they chose is correct or incorrect. One way this can be done is to deliver a summary of the learner’s answers after the practice session is complete and provide detail explanations of each answer.
Practice Principle 4 – Distribute and Mix Practice
Research shows that distributing practice produces long-term retention. Therefore, instead of teaching an entire unit and then having a practice session, it is important to divide the unit into smaller lessons and have the learners practice after a few lessons. Also, if the unit has different concepts that need to be learned, mix up those concepts when learners are practicing. An example of this is when students are learning different types of sentences (declarative, imperative, interrogative or exclamatory). Instead of chunking the questions into groups based on their type, it is better to mix them up when students are practicing so they can get a better sense of the differences.
Practice Principle 5 – Apply