Sunday, October 12, 2008

Gagne's 9

The recent SLATT class covered the Robert Gagne's famous 9 events of instruction. The below is from yet another link on the methodology:

1. Gain attention
In order for any learning to take place, you must first capture the attention of the student. A multimedia program that begins with an animated title screen sequence accompanied by sound effects or music startles the senses with auditory or visual stimuli. An even better way to capture students' attention is to start each lesson with a thought-provoking question or interesting fact. Curiosity motivates students to learn.

2. Inform learners of objectives
Early in each lesson students should encounter a list of learning objectives. This initiates the internal process of expectancy and helps motivate the learner to complete the lesson. These objectives should form the basis for assessment and possible certification as well. Typically, learning objectives are presented in the form of "Upon completing this lesson you will be able to. . . ." The phrasing of the objectives themselves will be covered under Robert Mager's contributions later in this chapter.

3. Stimulate recall of prior learning
Associating new information with prior knowledge can facilitate the learning process. It is easier for learners to encode and store information in long-term memory when there are links to personal experience and knowledge. A simple way to stimulate recall is to ask questions about previous experiences, an understanding of previous concepts, or a body of content.

4. Present the content
This event of instruction is where the new content is actually presented to the learner. Content should be chunked and organized meaningfully, and typically is explained and then demonstrated. To appeal to different learning modalities, a variety of media should be used if possible, including text, graphics, audio narration, and video.

5. Provide "learning guidance"
To help learners encode information for long-term storage, additional guidance should be provided along with the presentation of new content. Guidance strategies include the use of examples, non-examples, case studies, graphical representations, mnemonics, and analogies.

6. Elicit performance (practice)
In this event of instruction, the learner is required to practice the new skill or behavior. Eliciting performance provides an opportunity for learners to confirm their correct understanding, and the repetition further increases the likelihood of retention.

7. Provide feedback
As learners practice new behavior it is important to provide specific and immediate feedback of their performance. Unlike questions in a post-test, exercises within tutorials should be used for comprehension and encoding purposes, not for formal scoring. Additional guidance and answers provided at this stage are called formative feedback.

8. Assess performance
Upon completing instructional modules, students should be given the opportunity to take (or be required to take) a post-test or final assessment. This assessment should be completed without the ability to receive additional coaching, feedback, or hints. Mastery of material, or certification, is typically granted after achieving a certain score or percent correct. A commonly accepted level of mastery is 80% to 90% correct.

9. Enhance retention and transfer (to the job)
Determining whether or not the skills learned from a training program are ever applied back on the job often remains a mystery to training managers - and a source of consternation for senior executives. Effective training programs have a "performance" focus, incorporating design and media that facilitate retention and transfer to the job. The repetition of learned concepts is a tried and true means of aiding retention, although often disliked by students. (There was a reason for writing spelling words ten times as grade school student.) Creating electronic or online job-aids, references, templates, and wizards are other ways of aiding performance

2 comments:

Corrina Voon Ling Ling said...

Inform learners of objectives:-

I am very proud of my students when they achieved to identify the learning objectives by the end of the lesson of 3 hours (BM237 Managing Integrated Global Supply Chains).

Example of an activity that they did was student centred learning environment.

Firstly, I would show them slides of the chapters for an hour. At the second hour, I would change the learning session to become learn and practice. We did example, calculation (based on real scenario)according step by step, lecturer lead and students follows for 3 rounds. Students will do it themselves during the 4th and 5th round.
Almost the end of the second to third hour would be discussion/competition in forecasting for each of the team/company. Lastly, students presentations reports would be presented and answer my question posted at the beginning of the class which is "What is our learning objective for today's lesson?" or "What have you learnt as the objective of our lesson today?"

Anonymous said...

As a language lecturer, I find Gagne's 9 events of instruction very useful for students to achieve the learning objectives in my lessons. One of the things that I have started doing in my classes is laying out the learning objectives (in keywords, not in actual sentences to save space that is) at the beginning of the lesson on the whiteboard. This simple step sets the pace for the whole lesson right from the start. It clearly spells out the list of tasks that students are expected to do and it gets them to be more focused. I like it when I can see results being achieved by the students and that they can see it too. It's a win-win situation for all!

Kalai Supramaniam
Language/SASS