The Gagnè's Nine Steps of Instruction (EDUC633) Distance Education Learning Theory
- Marissa_Claus-Video Blogs
- Oct 7, 2019
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 9, 2019
When establishing a distance education course there need to be a purposeful goal foundation set for the instructor, the students, and online community that is influenced from an educational theory and research. Robert Gagnè's proposes a learning theory that stipulates there are several types or levels of learning and each requires a different type of instruction. He has had identified these five types of learning: verbal information, intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, motor skills, and attitudes. Cognitive strategies must be learned and there must be opportunity to practice developing new solutions to problems; to learn new attitudes, the learner must be exposed to a credible role model or persuasive arguments (Culatta, 2018). In an educational situation, this is where the educator takes precedence as a positive role model for the student in providing a positive experience for a student. The Gagnè's Nine Steps of Instruction set procedural steps to follow as instructional strategy. The steps are as follows:
(1) Gain attention of learners
(2) Inform learners of learning objectives
(3) Stimulate recall of prior learning
(4) Present the content, break down into components to avoid information overload
(5) Provide learning guidance
(6) Elicit performance
(7) Provide feedback to learners
(8) Assess their performance
(9) Enhance knowledge retention and transfer job-make connections to real-life, authentic
(2008).
One of the strengths of this theory is that it sets a protocol that can be fit for any instruction at any grade level for in the class room or for distance education. When addressing a specific population, there is consideration of how to target their engagement/attention and then provide them purpose for their learning. In regards for (3) with stimulating prior knowledge, this helps the students create connections to the content. This can be a strength and a weakness in a distance educational course. In a distance education course, a teacher may have to provide a customized survey to help gauge what the students know about the content or topic. Instructors need to understand the attention span and learning processes of individuals of their students in consideration of step (4) with presentation of content. With creating a digital media lesson in a distance education course, instructors need to remember learning relies on four key processes in e-lessons. First, the learner focuses on specific key graphics and words in the lessons to process, secondly, they rehearse this information into working memory to organize and integrate into existing knowledge into long-term memory. Third, for this integration to work, the limited working memory capacity cannot be overloaded with and lessons should apply cognitive load reduction techniques. Lastly, the new knowledge stored in long-term memory must be retrieved to apply in the job and in different applications which is a process of transfer of learning (Clark & Mayer, 2016, p.43). The learning guidance is objectives from the teacher. At elementary level, the ideal would be for the teacher to provide scanned examples of student-created work of what below, on, and above expectations for students to reference and many visual examples as guidance. For the steps of (7) and (8) a beneficial tool would be a provided rubric that helps provide expectations, feedback and the overall assessment of their performance. With step (9) this seems most practical with distance education courses that are for upper education that the content can be applied to job connections and trainings. When it comes to most distance education or virtual classroom academics, a lot of these courses are for basic skills to get the certifications for students. If I was using Gagnè's Nine Steps of Instruction for my own distance course development, I would do my best to make content and connections real-life and authentic. For example, if doing Elementary Education Social Studies, I could create a discussion/debate social platform and have students discuss a current event topic with support of articles and present from both sides of the issue. As the instructor, it’s under your professional discretion to make the educational decisions based on philosophy, ethics, and the educational priorities of your student’s best interests to shape the course effectively. Teachers must be flexible to change, since with an educational plan one size does not fit all.
References
Clark, R.C., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). E-learning and the science of instruction: Proven
guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning
(4th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Wiley & Sons. ISBN: 9781119158660.
Culatta, R. (2018). Conditions of Learning (Robert Gagne). Retrieved from
(2008). Brief Summary of Robert Gagné proposed instructional design process. (PDF
accessed from:
Comments