Priorities for Evaluating Instructional Materials

Priorities for Evaluating Instructional Materials

Priority Area: Learning

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By

Prof. Marcela Barrantes Loaiza

            The process of learning in a student begins at a very early age. During this process, the parents are the first teachers a child has. Afterwards, when the child goes to school, the teacher becomes a very important part of their learning process.

            Therefore, being a teacher is not as easy as it seems. Gathering activities, creating instructional materials and strategies that can be interesting to the learners is part of the job.

           

On this reading, the priority of the instructional materials, is the evaluation on the learning area. The reading provides us, teachers, many different strategies that can be use in order to examine the active participation and lesson-related tasks included with the materials used in class.

            The strategies given by many of the authors in the reading are important, if a teacher wants an instructional material for evaluation, to be effective and useful in class. Thereby, a brief explanation of the different strategies will be given, as follows:

            Motivation, a strategy that includes positive expectation, feedback, and appearance. Three features that increases the curiosity of the learner.

            Teaching “big ideas”, as is quoted in the reading, should make an instructional material teach important concepts, ideas or themes by giving the students focus and completeness of the subject area.

            Explicit Instruction, is a strategy that should make the instructional materials contain clear statements of information, clarity of directions and explanations and exclusion of ambiguity, this last one is a mistake most of the teacher make a lot, because we, teachers, try so hard to let the student know that the teacher knows what he/she is doing, that we forget what the point in matter is?

            Guidance and support, this helps the students become more independent learners and thinkers, and it depends on the level and adaptability the student has. On the level of guidance and support the students could receive previews and worksheets that help them to organize what they are learning, especially at the early stages of learning. Some activities are given too, such as:

·         Organize routines for orderly learning and searching of information.

·         Better thinking skills using guided instructions in form of names and definitions, models and explanations to give the opportunity of practice and broad problem-solving strategies.

·         Feed backs about the accuracy and adequacy of performance makes the learner become more interested in the class and learn more.

·         Other forms of guidance are the questions, which provide powerful guidance is effective to vary timing, positioning, or cognitive levels of questions.

On the adaptability of guidance and support varies for everyone, for advanced students, the level of guidance and support would not be the same as for beginning students or for younger students. Some of the adaptabilities are:

·         Lectures help “advanced” students; “average” students need scaffolding to fade as they gain knowledge and skills. Plus, research shows that students with less expertise require more structure, active learning and guidance.

·         Scaffolding supports advanced learning by asking focused questions, giving prompts or tips, modeling the thinking process and explaining it, and giving informative feedback moves students toward higher levels of learning. And includes just enough guidance and support with gradual transfer of responsibility for learning from teacher to student.

·         Too much feedback interferes with learning process.

·         Materials should accommodate differences in learning styles with variety of activities and modalities and they should be alternative learning materials with additional support and guidance for those who need it and additional enrichment activities for the others.

·         Guidance and support in online learning, Artino reported that students who can self-regulate, who possess self-efficacy, and who collaborate and seek success from others will be more successful with online learning.

·         Differences for low-ability and high-ability students online: for high ability students - analogies help them make connections between concepts, - animations help them, - they seek to understand the content rather than memorize the terms, symbols and formulas, -they benefit from key combinations, menus with different level, analogies, fewer terms in the content, more learner control, and use of the internet. For low-ability students – analogies help them make connections between concepts, - animations help them, -seek to memorize the terms, symbols, and formulas, - benefit from illustrations, clear instructions, guidelines for self-assessments and familiar icons, - learn less with complex graphics, too much hierarchy in navigation, and too many navigation tools.

Active participation of students this strategy helps the students learn more.

Targeted instructional and assessment strategies depends upon alignment of strategies which is the method or series of activities provided for the students to achieve the targeted outcome, and completeness of strategies should achieve the learning outcomes. Teach the students to solve problems instead of preparing them for a test to get the right answers.

            In my opinion, the strategies given are very much like what we, teachers, need in order to make a good evaluation on instructional materials based on learning. Most of them have been learned and some have been heard but never put into practice. Nevertheless, the process to make our own good research on how to keep the lesson interesting, active, and beneficial is in progress and never ends.