Thomas Lehmann

Cognitive, metacognitive and motivational perspectives on preflection in self-regulated online learning

The results complement research on self-regulated learning in online learning environments.Findings indicate the benefits of directed preflective prompts for novice learners.Personalisation and adaptation of prompting in online learning is crucial for future research. Self-regulated learning is regarded as a critical component of successful online education. Hence, the development of effective online education requires an orchestration of external control and freedom for self-regulation. Prompts are regarded as effective means for promoting such personalised and adaptive learning processes in online education. Within two experimental studies, the effectiveness of preflective and reflective prompts is tested. Additionally, personal characteristics such as motivation and learning preferences are controlled. Results indicate that directed preflective prompts work best for novice learners. Such prompts also activate positive motivation within online learning environments. Still, more research is needed for investigating personalised and adaptive realisation of preflective prompts as well as automated feedback for SRL.

What is Instructional Design

Instructional Design (ID) is commonly defined as a systematic procedure in which educational and training programs are developed and composed aiming at a substantial improvement of learning (e.g., Reiser & Dempsey, 2007).

Prompted Journal Writing Supports Preservice History Teachers in Drawing on Multiple Knowledge Domains for Designing Learning Tasks.

Becoming a history teacher requires the integration of pedagogical knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and content knowledge. Because the integration of knowledge from different disciplines is a complex task, we investigated prompted learning journals as a method to support teacher students’ knowledge integration. Fifty-two preservice history teachers participated in the experimental study. They read a text about a historical event, a text about teaching history, and a text about cognitive learning processes. Then they wrote a learning journal entry about the three texts. To support the journal writing, the participants in the experimental condition received four integration prompts, whereas the participants in the control condition received no prompts. In the prompted condition, the students engaged more often in integration strategies at the cost of rehearsal and organization strategies. Rehearsal and integration strategies predicted students’ recall of knowledge and their ability to evaluate learning tasks. Integration strategies as elicited in the journals predicted preservice teachers’ performance when designing a learning task for history education. In solving this task, the prompted preservice teachers used the information from the three texts in a more balanced way than the unprompted students who strongly focused on content knowledge. The study illustrates the potentials of learning journals as a method to support knowledge integration in history teacher education.

The Practice of Instructional Design

Up to now, instructional design has been described as a science of planning (Leshin, Pollock, & Reigeluth, 1992; Schott, 1991) that contains both a theory and technology of planning.

Models of Instructional Design

In accordance with this precept, several scholars, such as Merrill (1994), Reigeluth (1993, 1999), Tennyson and Elmore (1997) and many others, have focused on theories of instructional design. However, a more detailed analysis reveals the observation that these authors do not describe theories of instructional design in a narrow sense but rather theories on learning and how instruction could operate on them (e.g., Tennyson, 2010).

Fields of Application

Higher education appears to be a popular field of participatory instructional design and rapid prototyping. Since decades, manifold efforts have been invested at universities and colleges to improve instruction and learning. These efforts have been made in particular to meet the needs of the stakeholders, i.e., the students attending institutions of higher education for the purpose of acquiring key competences.

Research-Based Instructional Design

From the very beginning, instructional design has been strongly influenced by information technology so that the label instructional technology sometimes became a synonym.