Instructional designers at work: A study of how designers design
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Instructional design (ID) in its short life has been dominated by behaviourist approaches despite critique focusing on issues of practice as well as theory. Nonetheless, little research has addressed two fundamental questions: “What constitutes good instructional design?” and “How do instructional designers create good design?” We have begun a search for answers by asking a sample of eight instructional designers to reconstruct how they helped faculty members deal with challenging design problems as they adopted a Learning Management System and other web-based technologies in support of their teaching. From audio-recordings we derived response categories consistently recurring within and across interviews, then validated our analysis with the sampled group of instructional designers. Our analysis suggests that instructional designers employ a set of social skills and cognitive tools that enable them to act as a pedagogical “conscience” in the design process. We interpret these skills in terms of “theory of mind” in the context of instructional design. Résumé : Durant sa courte existence, le domaine de la conception pédagogique a été dominé par les approches comportementales malgré la critique qui met l’accent sur les questions pratiques aussi bien que théoriques. Néanmoins, peu de recherches ont abordé deux questions fondamentales : « Qu’est-ce qu’une bonne conception pédagogique ? » et « Comment les concepteurs pédagogiques élaborent-ils un bon concept ? ». Nous avons commencé notre recherche de réponses en demandant à un échantillon de huit concepteurs pédagogiques de reconstruire la manière dont ils ont aidé les professeurs à composer avec des problèmes de conception particulièrement difficiles tandis que ces derniers procédaient à l’implantation d’un système de gestion de l’apprentissage et d’autres technologies Web comme soutien à l’enseignement. À partir des enregistrements sonores, nous avons déterminé des catégories de réponses qui apparaissaient de manière récurrente dans les divers entretiens ; puis, nous avons fait valider notre analyse par notre groupe-échantillon de concepteurs pédagogiques. Notre analyse suggère que les concepteurs pédagogiques utilisent un ensemble de compétences sociales et d’outils cognitifs qui leur permettent d’agir en tant que « conscience » pédagogique lors du processus de conception. Nous interprétons ces compétences sous l’angle de la « théorie de l’esprit » dans le contexte de la conception pédagogique.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.051 | 0.097 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".