Abstract
When choosing instructional methods, instructional designers trade-off or sacrifice an outcome, such as effectiveness, efficiency, or appeal. In instructional planning theory, this is referred to as values about priorities. When values about priorities are combined with conditions about content, we expect that a different instructional outcome is sacrificed. The purpose of this research is to expand the ideas presented in our previous paper on the topic of how instructional designers actually use instructional planning theory to judge the usefulness of instructional methods. We asked 56 instructional designers to rate the usefulness of 31 instructional methods within four content conditions (cognitive, affective, psychomotor, and interpersonal) and three outcome values (effectiveness, efficiency, and appeal). The results show that learning domain, learning outcome, and the interaction of domain and outcome have a statistically-significant influence on a designer’s judgments regarding the usefulness of an instructional method. Furthermore, useful methods for cognitive content sacrifice appeal, useful methods for affective and psychomotor content sacrifice efficiency, and useful methods for interpersonal content sacrifice effectiveness. Overall, the results provide evidence that supports the core principles of instructional planning theory, specifically associated with the interaction between conditions and values. The results also provide instructional designers further guidance in selecting the most useful instructional methods.
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Honebein, P.C., Honebein, C.H. Effectiveness, efficiency, and appeal: pick any two? The influence of learning domains and learning outcomes on designer judgments of useful instructional methods. Education Tech Research Dev 63, 937–955 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-015-9396-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-015-9396-3