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Nine Critical Elements for Effective Online Learning

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www.pearsonschool.com/digital

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The Importance ofInstructional DesignEducation in America is nearing a tipping point. Every day, thousands of students with great potential and promise drop out of high school. Equally alarming is the fact nearly one-third of students entering some type of postsecondary education need to take remedial courses in one or more subjects because they lack the skills to take standard credit-bearing courses (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2004). With so much at stake, more focus needs to be placed on designing learning environments that keep students engaged through graduation day while truly preparing them for the future and the ever-increasing demands of a global workplace.

One of the keys to making swift, dramatic improvements in education is technology. Technology is more prevalent, cost-effective and user-friendly than ever before. The online curriculum and learning management systems now available enable educators to deliver rigorous content to the right student, at the right time and in the right mode. By personalizing the learning experience and using technology to make the most out of every learning day, schools and districts are realizing tremendous gains and helping more and more students reach their full potential.

All digital curriculum is not created equal, however. The quality of the content and the level of student improvement are directly correlated to how well the curriculum is designed and delivered. Building on its mission to help students achieve their greatest potential, Pearson incorporates sound instructional design principles into its educational solutions to help administrators, educators and – most importantly – students achieve success.

By definition, instructional design is a system for developing consistent and reliable education and training programs (Gustafson and Branch, 2007, p. 11). Likewise, the goals of educational technology are to facilitate learning and improve performance. While each can help facilitate educational processes on their own, we can truly affect change through melding the two together into a single, well-executed strategy.

NovaNET® Courseware is a comprehensive, online system that delivers proven, rigorous core secondary curriculum designed to help every student reach three specific goals:

• Achievement of objective-level mastery

• Preparation for the challenges of high school

• Readiness for graduation and college

In pursuit of these goals, Pearson has incorporated three specific instructional design best practices into NovaNET Courseware:

• Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction, a research-based description of external conditions that optimize internal learning processes

• Visual Literacy, how material is organized to optimize retention

• Cognitive Load Theory, learning principles that utilize a research-based understanding of cognitive learning processes to create effective learning materials and environments

In leveraging all of these research-proven best practices, NovaNET Courseware is one of the most comprehensive, pedagogically well-designed educational systems ever.

For the full picture, download all three white papers.

This white paper discusses how NovaNET Courseware integrates Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction. The Cognitive Load Theory and Visual Literacy white papers are available for download at www.pearsonschool.com/novanetcourseware.

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Understanding Gagné’s Nine Events of InstructionOriginally outlined by Robert M. Gagné, the Nine Events of Instruction, are conditions that facilitate the learning process and “support internal processes such as attention, encoding, and retrieval” (Driscoll, 2007, p. 41). If an educational experience does not meet these conditions, it will simply not be effective. Therefore, Gagné, Wager, Golas and Keller (2005) define instruction as “a set of events external to the learner designed to support the internal processes of learning” (p. 194).

Before we can examine how the nine events have been incorporated into NovaNET Courseware, we need a clearer understanding of the nine events themselves. As shown below, Gagné’s nine events fall into three distinct categories.

Figure 1: Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction*

*Derived from Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology (Driscoll, 2007, p. 41)

PreparatorySet

Instructionand Practice

Assessmentand Transfer

1. Gaining the attention of the learner2. Informing the learner of the objective3. Stimulating recall of prior knowledge

4. Presenting the stimulus5. Providing learning guidance6. Eliciting learner performance7. Providing feedback to the learner

8. Assessing learner performance9. Enhancing retention and transfer of

information learned

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Preparatory SetHow does an educator prepare a student for the learning experience? Before educators actually present a target concept, they must first engage their learners. This is the goal of the first three events, which together comprise the Preparatory Set.

Gaining the attention of the learner occurs when the instructor changes the stimuli by engaging student interest and/or introducing a real world scenario. For example, a biology teacher might introduce a lesson on the cardiovascular system by having the students take their pulse at rest, and then again after mild exercise. They might then ask a question such as, “How does the heart work to keep up with your change in motion?” By piquing student interest about the inner workings of the heart, we engage learners and simultaneously activate the motivation.

A second level of motivation comes from students gaining a clear understanding of the lesson’s goals. Gagné’s second event, informing the learner of the objective, (Gagné et al., 2005, p. 196) focuses on exactly this idea. Executive control occurs when learners establish expectations for learning and begin to choose strategies to best meet those goals. If students are expected to successfully use long-division to solve a

mathematical word problem, the objective might read: “At the end of this lesson, the student should be able to use the steps of long division to solve word problems.” Clearly stated objectives give students the context they need to know exactly what they are being asked to learn. If educators provide no objective, learners may not have the same expectations as their teachers, which can cause confusion and miscommunication (Gagné et al., 2005).

The third event, stimulating recall of prerequisite knowledge, activates working memory and helps students make connections between what they already know and the new material. This is essential, as information in working memory is more likely to move to long-term memory when new concepts are built upon previous knowledge. According to Gagné, Wager, Golas, and Keller (2005), “Much of new learning is building on what we already know” (p. 196). When learning about long division, students can build upon their prior understanding of multiplication concepts. Likewise, helping students leverage prior knowledge when tasked with identifying the mood of a literary selection could be as simple as asking them listen to a song that is sorrowful or happy or dark. In this second example, the ability to transfer the skill of identifying mood when reading the selection is engaged through retrieval of prior knowledge.

The Preparatory Set inNovaNET Courseware Gagné’s first three events of instruction are generally embedded into the introduction in order to pique learner interest, provide expected learning outcomes and stimulate recall. While they are external to the learner and thus variables that educators can affect, Gagné’s events of instruction reinforce internal learning processes in the learner’s brain.

An important note: The events of instruction do not necessarily have to be presented in order. In addition, not all events must be presented in each lesson. In fact, if events are not presented in a lesson, the learner might take control of their own learning by creating the activities that create the events themselves (Gagné et al., 2005).

In NovaNET Courseware, lesson introductions equate to Gagné’s Preparatory Set. These introductions have two main components: 1) an introductory screen, usually with visual and written stimuli; and 2) lesson objectives. Following Gagné’s first three events (gaining learners’ attention, presenting the instructional objectives, and calling upon prior knowledge), NovaNET Courseware lesson introductions prepare students through building upon existing knowledge, outlining expected learning outcomes and increasing motivation.

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Gaining the learner’s attention and stimulating recall of prerequisite knowledge

This lesson introduction uses both visual and written stimuli to gain the attention of the learner. A bright, intriguing image directly relates to the target content on the screen. In addition, a real world scenario is used help students make connections to prior knowledge.

Informing the learner of the objective

In this example, the lesson has a single objective. This objective, along with the Key Terms, is presented to activate students’ executive control and prepare them for expected learning outcomes.

Table 1: How NovaNET Courseware aligns to Gagné’s Preparatory Set events

Instruction and Practice How does a well-designed instructional experience present material to be learned in the most effective and engaging way possible? Entering into the second of the three categories, we now move from setting up instruction to the instruction itself.

Presenting the stimulus (Driscoll, 2007, p. 41) addresses how an educator or educational experience provides students with the content needed to meet the stated objective. How the content is presented depends to a large degree upon the nature of the information itself. For example, if the objective were to “explain the law-making process in the House of Representatives,” students would need information presented in a way that shows a clear, linear, step-by-step process, accompanied with the appropriate detail required to master the

objective. During this event of instruction, students often receive visual or auditory cues that emphasize the importance of particular pieces of information. These cues help to establish selective perception, and can be indicated through various techniques, including:

• Italics, bold or underlined terms

• Arrows or labels

• Photos, graphics or diagrams

• Color coding (but note, NovaNET Courseware does not depend solely on color cues given that they would not hold up for color blind students)

• Graphic organizers or outlines (Gagné et al., 2005, p. 197)

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Here, instructional designers have enhanced text describing how a bill becomes a law by using a flow chart and illustrations to help the learner focus on the different steps of the process. The principle of selective perception allows the instructional designer to draw learners’ attention to the items of greatest importance, such as the order and individual steps of the process, and who participates in each.

Example: Visual Cues

Providing learning guidance (Driscoll, 2007, p. 41) is an essential component to both the instructional and learning processes. This phase of instruction includes strategies to help learners make connections and associations to new information. According to Gagné, when presented with the stimulus, “learners encounter the content they are to learn; in this event they establish a context for it” (p. 198). The learning guidance required depends on the nature of the content as well as the varying styles of learners. In some cases, educators might use a scaffolding approach to build concepts, one on top of another. In others, they might use broad, leading questions to help learners discover the answers for themselves.

For example, when studying climate in a science course, students might be presented with varying types of climates found on Earth. A series of questions might help students use this new information to discover the type of climate in which they live. This real world application provides context to the content, and therefore assists in encoding the information during the learning process (Gagné, Briggs and Wager, 1998, p. 5). Depending on the learning styles of the students, educators must use varying degrees of guidance and adapt that guidance accordingly for optimal learning (Gagné et al., 2005, pp. 198-199).

Eliciting learner performance (p. 199) occurs once learners have been provided with adequate guidance. During this stage of the learning process, students should be able to demonstrate some understanding of the expected outcome outlined by the objective.

For example, if students have just received instruction and guidance regarding the correct grammatical usage of who versus whom, they should be able to identify the correct usage in a series of sentences. Building upon that activity, students should be able to write a series of sentences using who and whom correctly.

According to Gagné, there are two purposes of this event. First, in order to perform the given activity, learners must organize a response from long-term memory that has been learned in short-term memory. Second, eliciting student performance gives the opportunity for corrective and constructive feedback (p. 200).

The last step of Instruction and Practice (p. 200), serves multiple purposes, providing:

• Reinforcement to a correct answer

• Guidance as to the degree of correctness of the task

• Corrective feedback if the response is incorrect

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Even though learners perform an activity correctly or answer practice questions correctly, they have not necessarily mastered the objective. It is their ability to indicate why the response is correct – as well as recognize what might still need improvement – that gives reinforcement to the students, validates their performance, and helps them take their abilities to the next level.

For example, if an adolescent involved in gymnastics correctly does a cartwheel for the first time, feedback might be as simple as a pat on the back or applause. This simple, positive reinforcement serves to motivate

the student toward continued success. Still, it would be appropriate, and maybe more beneficial, to give feedback that indicates the extent to which the student delivered on the expectation of performance. Our gymnast learning the cartwheel might perform even better the next time with that pat on the back followed by the coach saying, “That was fantastic. Now point your toes and straighten your knees even more.”

Of course, if learner performance is altogether incorrect, direct feedback and/or corrective remediation might be required.

Instruction and Practice in NovaNET Courseware Two components of the NovaNET Courseware learning model align directly to events that fall under Instruction and Practice. The Instruction and Practice components of the NovaNET Courseware lesson model perform a number of functions, such as:

• Presenting instructional content or stimulus

• Providing learning guidance

• Eliciting learner performance

• Providing corrective and constructive feedback

The manner in which the stimulus is presented is dependent on the nature of the content and the expected outcome of the lesson objectives. Learning guidance serves to enhance the presentation of the stimulus and help students make appropriate connections to the content.

NovaNET Courseware accomplishes these through various strategies, some of which are:

• Real world scenarios

• Multiple representations of text, such as graphs, photos and videos

• Scaffolded questions that build upon concepts

• Interactive graphics

Throughout the Instruction and Practice sections of a NovaNET Courseware lesson, students are presented with guided and independent practice activities aligned to lesson objectives. These activities require students to practice using what they have learned and demonstrate understanding of the content. Along with these guided and independent practice activities, students receive corrective and constructive feedback. To enhance the learning process, this feedback performs multiple functions. First, it acknowledges the answer the student provided. For correct answers, NovaNET Courseware either offers reinforcement or indicates the extent to which the answer was correct. For incorrect responses, it helps students understand how to arrive at the correct answer and gives them remedial resources when merited.

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Presenting the stimulus

In this example, the stimulus is an instructional text supporting a literature selection, An Episode of War, by Stephen Crane. NovaNET Courseware presents students with on-screen guidance, helping them learn what to do while reading the passage.

Providing guidance to the learner

Following the excerpt from the literature selection shown above, NovaNET Courseware offers students learning guidance via a questioning strategy. Here, students see a photo and a question representing the plot of the passage. When students click the “Show Me” button, NovaNET Courseware provides the answer. This questioning strategy helps to chunk the content and build context around the expected learning outcome.

Eliciting performance

Once students have worked through the content of a lesson, a guided practice activity is designed to elicit learner performance to help determine whether or not they are achieving the lesson goals. In this case, after reading excerpts from An Episode of War, students are asked to put significant events in order to see if they have understood the plot.

Table 2: How NovaNET Courseware uses Gagné’s Instruction and Practice events

Table 2 Continued 4

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Providing feedback

When merited, students are provided feedback specifying the extent to which they correctly or incorrectly performed on the task at hand. Students gain a clear understanding of what is correct and incorrect, and are then given another chance to correct their mistakes.

If learners continue to answer incorrectly, the correct answers are provided along with corrective and constructive feedback. In addition, students can toggle between incorrect and correct answers to learn how to fix their mistakes.

Table 2: How NovaNET Courseware uses Gagné’s Instruction and Practice events

Assessment and Transfer The final two events of Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction are Assessing Performance and Enhancing Retention and Transfer (Driscoll, 2007, p. 41), what we will refer to as simply Assessment and Transfer. Assessing the learner’s performance is intended to determine whether or not students have achieved the learning objective. To be effective, this process needs to answer two questions:

1. Does this assessment accurately reflect the learning objective?

2. Can the student repeatedly perform or indicate an understanding of the material?

According to Gagné et al. (2005), if the student performed correctly more than once or twice, using different examples, “we would have greater confidence of his or her learning” (p. 201). For example, a teacher can

be confident that students have mastered the objective on the correct usage of the Pythagorean Theorem when learners have consistently and accurately used the formula to solve a variety of geometric problems.

Enhancing retention and transfer (Driscoll, 2007, p. 41) goes beyond asking students to exhibit mastery of an objective using different examples of the same problem. Learners need to practice with the information over time to maximize retention. To ensure that they can transfer the knowledge, they also need opportunities to apply what they have learned to situations that vary from the original instructional format. Good instruction entails not just repetitive practice, but practice that varies how they must apply the information or skills to ensure transfer.

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Imagine a scenario in which a group of government students is learning about the United States Supreme Court, judicial restraint and judicial activism, and the impact court decisions have had on American history. In order for them to truly retain and transfer these complex concepts, they must be able to apply judicial restraint and judicial activism to various cases they study over

the course of the unit. How might they practice with that knowledge? They might apply their understanding to a real world setting by conducting a mock trial or examining a landmark Supreme Court case. Through methods like these, students enhance their retention through transferring what they have learned to a variety of scenarios.

Assessment and Transfer in NovaNET Courseware NovaNET Courseware uses a number of strategies to assess mastery of objectives, as well as encourage learners to apply their knowledge in various settings. At the end of every lesson, NovaNET Courseware presents students with quiz items that directly align to the lesson objectives. If learners do not demonstrate mastery, they are redirected back to the lesson for review. If they do demonstrate mastery, they can move on in the course. In addition, at the end of every module, unit and semester, learners are required to take an exam. Just like quizzes, each exam item directly aligns to the lesson objectives. Exam items are drawn from a large pool of questions, ensuring each student receives a unique exam. How learners perform on the exam demonstrates their level of mastery, and NovaNET Courseware then reports performance back to both the students and the instructor. By providing students with multiple opportunities to perform or demonstrate understanding of the material, we can have greater confidence that they have mastered the objective(s).

NovaNET Courseware also provides opportunities for learners to apply new knowledge in ways that vary from the original method of instruction. Examples from actual NovaNET Courseware courses include:

• Using the scientific method to conduct scientific lab experiments

• Applying the writing process to several different writing styles

• Applying concepts in economics to real world scenarios in personal finance

When learners are able to transfer knowledge within varying situations, they deepen their understanding as that knowledge is moved into long-term memory.

Assessing performance

At the end of every lesson in NovaNET Courseware, the students take a quiz, with questions that directly align to the objectives and instructional strategies used in the lesson.

Table 3: How NovaNET Courseware uses Gagné’s Assessment and Transfer events

Table 3 Continued 4

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Enhancing retention

NovaNET Courseware presents exams strategically at the end of every module, unit and semester. Each exam item directly aligns to each lesson objective within that module, unit and/or semester. Through this strategy, NovaNET Courseware can determine whether or not students have retained the information or mastered the objective(s), and then report that information back to both the learners and the instructor.

Ensuring transfer

This is an example of a writing prompt presented to learners after a series of lessons on how to write a composition. Throughout the module, learners are provided instruction and guidance on the five phases of the writing process in regards to composition writing. Here, students are required to write a composition using the strategies they have just learned.

In this case from biology in NovaNET Courseware, learners may have recently taken a lesson on the structure of DNA and the purpose of extracting DNA. Following the lesson, students are presented with a lab lesson and lab activity requiring them to transfer their understanding of DNA to a scenario different from the original instructional format.

Table 3: How NovaNET Courseware uses Gagné’s Assessment and Transfer events

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ConclusionAs illustrated, the instructional model in NovaNET Courseware utilizes Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction to achieve specific pedagogical goals: to facilitate learning and to improve performance. Each of these external events of instruction is embedded into NovaNET Courseware to facilitate the internal processes of learning.

As noted, the events do not have to be presented in order, nor does each even have to be apparent in every lesson. However, Gagné’s events of instruction are interwoven throughout NovaNET Courseware to provide instructionally sound, research-proven digital curriculum to maximize student success.

About the NovaNET Courseware Learning Model“Instructional designers believe that the use of systematic design procedures can make instruction more effective, efficient, and relevant than less rigorous approaches to planning instruction” (Gustofson and Branch, 2007, p. 11). It is this belief that fostered and nurtured the design of NovaNET Courseware including the learning model itself as well as each media treatment that is paired with content. Instructional design strategies derived from Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction, the principles of contrast, alignment, repetition and proximity (or CARP principles) within Visual Literacy, and Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory work together in tandem to make the instruction within NovaNET Courseware “effective, efficient, and relevant” (p. 11).

• First, Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction outline comprehensive strategies designed to facilitate learning and improve student performance. These strategies have been implemented in NovaNET Courseware in order to ensure the most effective and efficient instructional components are included, to provide the best experience possible for the learner.

• Second, the Visual Literacy principles (contrast, alignment, repetition, and proximity) are design actions that, when utilized appropriately, properly organize the material for maximum effect. In NovaNET Courseware, the visual organization of the material on each screen increases the learner’s ability to understand the information being presented. This critical element helps to promote cognitive information processing, effectively enhancing retention of the material (Lohr, 2008).

• Finally, the Cognitive Load Theory defined by John Sweller et al. (2006), outlines Efficiency in Learning Guidelines that, if followed, manage intrinsic and germane load, while limiting extraneous or irrelevant load. The design of NovaNET Courseware utilizes the Efficiency in Learning Guidelines in order to ensure the learner is able to efficiently and effectively move through the program.

The instructional design principles outlined in this report are implemented in NovaNET Courseware to support the ultimate goal of this core digital courseware—facilitating learning and improving performance for any learner who enters the program.

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ReferencesClark, R.C., Nguyen, F., & Sweller, J. (2006). Efficiency in Learning: Evidence-Based Guidelines to Manage Cognitive Load. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.

Driscoll, Marcy P. (2007). Psychological Foundations of Instructional Design. In R.A. Reiser & J.V. Dempsey (Eds.), Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology (p. 41). Upper Saddle River: Merrill Prentice Hall.

Lohr, Linda L. (2008). Creating Graphics for Learning and Performance. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, Merril Prentice Hall.

Gagné, R.M., Wager, W. W., Golas, K. C., Keller, J. M., (2005). Principles of Instructional Design (5th ed.). Belmont: Wadsworth/Thompson Learning.

Gagné, Robert M. et. al. “The Events of Instruction”. Principles of Instructional Design. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. 1988.

Gustofson, Kent L. and Branch, Robert M. (2007). What is Instructional Design? In R.A. Reiser & J.V. Dempsey (Eds.), Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology (p. 41). Upper Saddle River: Merrill Prentice Hall.

U.S. Department of Education. (2004). The Condition of Education 2004. Institute of Education Sciences National Center for Education Statistics (publication number NCES 2004–077). Retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2004/section5/indicator31.asp.