Week 1 - Aja's Reflections (Module I)

Keller's Motivational Design of Instruction

Keller ‘s(1983) Motivational Design of Instruction is a great read for novice students in the academic field of Instructional Design, Development, and Evaluation (IDDE) because it provides students with some brief historical contextualization about the field; calls on them to be an active creator of knowledge and participant in the discipline and lastly, via the motivational model, ARCS, Keller provides students with a theoretical framework and model in which they can potentially “produce instruction that is interesting, meaningful, and appropriately challenging” (p. 395). This final point is the most significant for those students who may decide to be life-long practitioners in the field.

            As I stated in my brief introductory posting on the discussion board, this is my 2^nd IDDE class, so my exposure to the discipline's theories, method and instructional strategies is still very limited, but steadily growing as I progress through my program of study. Keller’s article was very helpful because it revealed that the foundational work of early instructional scientists were historically influenced by such academic disciplines as behavioral psychology, cognitive-learning psychology, and information – processing. This information was important to me because it signaled the diverse ways in which people learn and understand the world; thus, as a future instructional designer-in-training, this knowledge will have an impact on the future decisions I make in regards to my choices of strategies, media, models, methods, and assessments.

            Another interesting point in the reading assignment was Keller’s call for practitioners in the field to strive to produce more theoretical research. Keller maintained that “Technology will benefit from useful syntheses of scientific knowledge if particular technologists make the effort to obtain knowledge and write syntheses.  In this same vein, these syntheses will be more meaningful and effective if they are presented in the context of an organized structure that facilitates their learning and retention” (p. 393).  Keller would move forward with the presentation of his own theoretical model of ARCS, yet his call for the production of more theoretical models still rings true in 2011. For example, currently, I am in the process of seeking a theoretical model as well as a validated and reliable assessment instrument that competently measures active learning on either a qualitative or quantitative level. I submitted a request for assistance to the Office of Institutional Research at Syracuse University as well as to a number of faculty members.  All of them sent back return responses that they were not aware of any such item that meets my request; however, urged that if I did indeed find anything in my continuing research that I share that information with them. Overall, although I am a novice in this academic field, I am quickly realizing that there is a need for more evidence based research on a variety of concepts in the discipline followed up with field testing for comprehensibility and utility for validation purposes.

            The ARCS model consists of four main components, Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction with a subset of instructional strategies. The instructional strategies are particularly useful when planning one's own instructional unit or as a checklist when evaluating an external selection. 

·         Attention: learner interest and curiosity must be aroused and maintained.

o   Attention strategies:

§  Incongruity and conflict: introducing a fact  that appears to contradict the student’s experience or plying the devil’s advocate in discussing an issue or current event of interest to the student

§  Concreteness: visual presentations or verbal presentation, such as anecdotes and biographies, attract the student’s interest

§  Variability: the student’s attention is caught or maintained by changes such as tone of voice, movements, instructional format, medium of instruction, layout and design of print material, and changes in interaction patterns such as changing from student-instructor interaction to student-student interaction

§  Humor: techniques as using puns during redundant or necessarily repeated information presentations, making humorous analogies, and telling jokes in introductions and conclusions

§  Inquiry: frequent engagement in problem-solving activities and providing opportunities for learners to select topics, projects, and assignments that can capitalize on their interests; and

§  Participation: involves such activities as games, role-playing, or simulations that involve active participation of the learners.

·         Relevance: learners must perceive their personal needs are met in an instructional situation.

o   Relevance strategies:

§  Experience: suggests that instruction should tell learners how new learning will use their existing skills, that analogies be used to relate current learning to prior experience, and that instruction be related to learner interests.

§  Present worth: suggests that instruction explicitly state the current value of instruction, as opposed to stressing its value in the future

§  Future usefulness: suggests explicitly tying instructional goals to the learner’s future activities and having learners participate in activities in which they can relate the instruction to their own future goals.

§  Need matching: provide students with opportunities to exercise responsibility, authority , and influence, as well as cooperative interactions

§  Modeling: having guest lecturers/visitors to speak on a topic; having top students server as class assistants/tutors; modeling through teacher actions and enthusiasm.

§  Choice: providing meaningful alternative ways and means to accomplish a goal or task; allowing students a choice in how they organize their work.

·         Confidence: learners must have appropriate expectations about themselves others, and the subject matter.

o   Confidence strategies:

§  Learning requirements: students should clearly know what is being taught (i.e.; include learning goals into instructional materials; provide self-evaluation tools and skills, and provide explanation of the criteria used in evaluation.).

§  Difficulty: learning materials should be sequenced in order of increasing difficulty, providing continual but reasonable challenge. Instruction that build on prior knowledge or requiring prerequisites incorporates this principle.

§  Expectations: suggestions for helping students acquire realistic goals and having a positive outlooks in terms of their personal effort and abilities via various metacognitive strategies and techniques such as teaching students to plan their work productively and helping students set realistic goals for progress and achievement.

§  Attributions: promoting student awareness of their own effort, success, and achievements as a oppose to attributing them to luck and external factors; allowing students to have more internal control over learning tasks; encouraging students to verbalize both their successes and failures.

§  Self-confidence: allowing students to experience increasing independence as they work at learning a skill; providing practice of skills under realistic conditions following initial learning under more sheltered, low-risk conditions; and helping students avoid the mental traps of perfectionism rather than taking satisfaction in their accomplishments.

·         Satisfaction: learners must receive the appropriate intrinsic and extrinsic rewards from instruction.

o   Satisfaction strategies:

§  Natural consequences: maximizing the positive consequences of learning that are intrinsic to the accomplishment(i.e., letting students use their own skills in realistic settings; verbally reinforcing a student's intrinsic pride in  completing a difficult assignment or task; allowing students who have mastered a particular task to help students who have not yet finished).

§  Unexpected rewards: offsetting boring tasks with extrinsic rewards

§  Positive outcome: instruction-supplied actions – verbal praise, personal attention; helpful feedback; motivating feedback (praise) immediately following task performance.

§  Negative influences: involves avoiding the use of threats; the use of surveillance practices (as opposed to positive attention); and external performance evaluation when student self-evaluation is possible.

§  Scheduling: the scheduling of frequent reinforcements when a student is learning a new task (schedule should be variable or have a random reinforcement pattern).

Limitations

Keller does inform readers that there is a limitation to the ARCS model in the “lack of specific, prescriptive [rigid, dogmatic - insertion mine] strategies” (p. 429). He acknowledges that the conditions of motivation have a certain amount of fluidity and that a particular motivational strategy that worked today might not work tomorrow. However, Keller was interested in outlining certain “enduring characteristics of people and of instructional materials that contribute to sustained motivation” (p.429-30).

References

Keller, J. M. (1983).  Motivational design of instruction.  In C.M. Reigeluth (Ed.), Instructional - design theories and models : An overview of their current status. (pp. 386-434).  Hilldale, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Keller, J.M. (1987a) Development and the use of the ARCS model of instructional design. Journal of instructional development, 10(3), 2-10.