Whole-Task Models in Education

Whole-task models support the development of educational programs for students who need to learn and transfer professional competences or complex cognitive skills to an increasingly varied set of real-world contexts and settings. They are a reaction to traditional atomistic approaches in which complex contents and tasks are reduced into increasingly simpler elements until reaching a level where the distinct elements can be transferred to the learners through presentation or practice. These approaches work well if there are few interactions between the elements, but they do not work well if the elements are interrelated because the whole is then more Jeroen J. G. van Merrienboer and Liesbeth Kester 442 than the sum of its parts. Whole-task models basically try to deal with complexity without losing sight of the relationships between elements. This chapter briefly discusses the history of whole-task models. They are rooted in motor learning and sports, andragogy and adult learning, and Gestalt psychology. The characteristics of whole-task models in the field of educational communications and technology are also discussed. Elaboration theory, goal-based scenarios, and fourcomponent instructional design are presented as three representative examples of whole-task models. We present empirical evidence for the effectiveness of the whole-task approach and the three example models. We conclude with a summary of findings and directions for future research on whole-task models.