A History of Instructional Design and Technology: Part II: A History of Instructional Design

Programmed instruction has become evident in standards and benchmarks used for lesson and curriculum planning for education today. These components make it easier for educators to follow and divide lessons into sections that are chronological and more easily understood by students and teachers.

Gagne's theory that subordinate skills must be obtained to master superordinate skills seems obvious, but not always so in the field of education. Since educators are always held accountable for information that students may not know, a lack of subordinate skills in certain subjects (such as math) may be the reason that students are missing fundamental knowledge that should allow them to build on what they know. For example, if a student has not learned math facts, he or she will not be able to do long division. Unfortunately, teachers are held accountable for what students don't know when there is no way to verify what they have been taught in the first place.

Summative and formative assessments are extremely important in the instructional design process. The problem in education seems to be that the people conducting them don't appear to have backgrounds in the field of education. I could go on for days, but clearly no formative evaluation was conducted before implementing NCLB, nor were they conducted prior to developing the Praxis series exams. It doesn't seem that the U.S. educational system will function properly until these assessment systems are improved.

I learned a lot from this reading. It never occured to me that instructional design was used by the military. Some other points that were reiterated in this reading were rapid prototyping (which I never knew the term for), authentic learning and distance learning; all of which were interesting to read again.