ID Phase II Design--Cognitive Strategies, Motivation and Engagement, Self-regulation and metacognition

This week I learnt a lot about matters in instructional design that we need pay attention to, as well as the models and theories we could get full use of.

In reading The Role of Self-Regulated Learning (Azevedo 2005), and Chapter 9, I understand how important motivation and volition work in our learning process. Therefore it is necessary to figure out where our target learners' motivation and volition lie in; how to motivate them toward the learning goal; what to offer in order to scaffold their self-regulated learning and how to assess their performance. Some useful and insightful concepts I noticed are as follows:

• Learners' motivation and volition are so important that even the great ID with "accurate content, related activities, and diligent preparation" can be less effective if we fail to incorporate proper strategies to invoke their motivation and volition to reach the goals.

  In applying systematic learning process, instructional designers are able to positively influence target learners' motivation and volition. And in doing so, we need to keep in mind the conditions that motivation is promoted, such as when learners' curiosity is aroused; when the content is closely related to their goals and when they believe in their success. Our purpose is to convey such conditions through our design.
• Hypermedia are believed by some educators to be applicable to facilitate students when learning complex science topics since they can form the multilayered, nonlinear and recursive relations in the field to some extent. However, there's a continuing debate about their effectiveness. 
• Studies indicate that learners need key metacognitive and self-regulatory skills to better learn complex science topics with hypermedia that scaffolding is necessary for them.
• Self-regulated learners are believed to be active and consciously manage their own learning strategies and pace, which are of such importance in efficiently learning with hypermedia.
• Research finds adaptive human scaffolding is helpful and different scaffolding conditions as well as different characteristics of learners affect the learning outcomes.

In reading A Review of Strategies for Sequencing and Synthesizing Instruction (Pattern & Chao & Reigeluth 1986), I realized the significance of content sequence and synthesis in curriculum design. Although this piece was done thirty years ago, the micro and macro level sequences and synthesis of knowledge and disciplines it illustrated are still insightful since the knowledge we absorb today are more and more multilayered among which the cross discipline knowledge is of importance. With the strategies for sequencing and synthesizing introduced in the paper, we are able to break our design into modules which represent different task and learning goals while we can also connect them based on their interrelationships to improve learners' comprehensive skills.

In reading Chapter 33, I mainly understand the dilemma in applying games into instructional design. Associating to the last core seminar hosted by professor Lee, I do believe well designed games can make learning content more receptive and help learners' realize goal easily and efficiently. While in practice, the game our group assigned got everyone confused with its complicated setting process. Thus I can see that instructional game design is even more challenging a field than e-learning, class design and so on, as the learning goal is not the only task for such designers, but also the consideration in creating the authentic learning environments; making it recreational but education-oriented at the same time; applying advanced technology but not let it prevail contents and etc.

References:

[IDT] Chapters 9, 33

Van Pattan, Chao, Reigeluth 1986

Azevedo 2005