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Instructional Design

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Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science

Synonyms

Organising instruction; Teaching procedures

Definition

How to design instructional procedures.

Introduction

Governing principles of instructional design can be derived from our knowledge of human cognition. In turn, the characteristics of human cognition are intricately bound in the structures and processes of evolutionary psychology. Cognitive load theory (Sweller et al. 2011) uses human cognitive architecture and evolutionary psychology to devise novel instructional procedures. Only some categories of knowledge can provide substantive subject matter for instruction with evolutionary psychology determining which subject matter can be meaningfully taught. Furthermore, the processing characteristics associated with teachable information closely mimic the information processing characteristics of biological evolution allowing us to use the well-known processes that guide biological evolution as a template to assist in understanding aspects of human cognition relevant to...

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References

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Correspondence to John Sweller .

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Sweller, J. (2021). Instructional Design. In: Shackelford, T.K., Weekes-Shackelford, V.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19650-3_2438

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