Instructional design, cognition, and technology: Applications to the teaching of scientific concepts

The effective educational use of information technologies depends crucially on good instructional design based on an adequate understanding of cognitive processes. To teach flexible intellectual performance, such design must ensure that the knowledge acquired by students be explicit, coherent, reliably interpretable, and testable. For example, the ability to use scientific or mathematical concepts requires both explicit general interpretation procedures and knowledge about various special cases. Detailed observations indicate that good scientists have these kinds of knowledge, but that students exhibit many mistakes traceable to knowledge that is fragmented and unin-terpretable. Instructional guidelines, based on such cognitive considerations, were tested in an experiment where students were taught an explicit procedure specifying the concept “acceleration,” and then diagnosed and corrected mistakes committed by themselves or others. Such teaching greatly improved students' concept interpretations and blocked previous misconceptions. Computers can provide powerful tools for research on instructional design and for implementing more effective teaching.