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For over 40 years I have been engaged in graduate education. These essays contain my advice for how to have a more successful graduate experience. Hope you find them useful. Dave Merrill Thank you for finding this page. I appreciate the many visitors who have cited these papers. My purpose is to make available my papers on instructional design as well as providing new ideas from time to time. We hope to provide some thought provoking items that may assist you in our instructional design and development efforts. We welcome your comments or critique. Send your reactions to mdavid.merrill@gmail.com If you have occasion to cite the published papers, or papers that have been accepted for publication that are reprinted on this site, please cite the published reference. For papers that are in progress and not yet published you are welcome to cite this web site as the source. All the papers on this page are on-line as Adobe PDF files. You will need an Adobe PDF reader to read these papers. The Adobe reader can be downloaded from Adobe's Web site. First Principles of Instruction Over the years I have had the opportunity to evaluate hundreds of instructional products. An amazing number of these are surprisingly ineffective and some do not teach at all. We reviewed a number of instructional design theories and models to try and determine those fundamental principles to which all of these various approaches agree. We have called these principles First Princiiples of Instruction. During the past several years I have had a number of opportunities to present these ideas. Following are some of the available materials describing these principles and their application. The following papers are organized to facilitate your study of first principles of instruction and task-centered instruction. Click on the title of the paper to access it. The following paper is the most recent complete summary of first principles of instruction.
The following is the original published paper identifying some of the theories that we reviewed to dervie these first principles of instruction.
The following papers elaborate first principles of instruction.
The following paper illustrates first principles using a course on first aid developed in Australia.
The central princple of first principles of instruction is task-centered or problem-centered. The following paper describes the analysis necessary to determine the components of a whole task or problem. The paper then describes a task-centered instructional strategy contrasted with a more typical topic-oriented instructional strategy.
First principles of instruction led to a modification of the accepted ADDIE instructional systems development model (ISD). Problem or Task-centered instruction suggests that we should start with the whole tasks to be learned or the whole problems to be solved. Analysis sholuld then determine what is required to learn to perform these tasks or solve these problems. This led to the Pebble-in-the-pond model for instructional design described in the following paper.
First Principles of Instruction can be used to evaluate existing instructional courses to determine the extent to which they implement these principles. It has been hypothesized that learning to accomplish complex tasks or solve complex problems will be facilitated to the extent that these principles are implemented. We have developed a rubric for evaluating existing courses on a 100 point scale that represents the extent to which a given course implements first principles of instruction. The folloing is a paper that presents this rubric.
An Entrepreneur course based on a task-centered insructional strategy and incorporating first principles of instruciton is available for review at the following URL: http://cito.byuh.edu/entrepreneur/main.swf
Papers (ˆTOPˆ) Below are the other papers on Instructional Technology in General, Instructional Transactions, and Knowledge Objects. Click on the title of the paper to access it.
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