Pedagogical Design: How have the ways of perceiving information changed, and what should teachers do about it?

How to explain something so that children understand it? How to make a student learn? How to motivate a teenager to get an education? These and similar questions are regularly asked by most teachers and parents who are anxious about their responsibilities for the education of the younger generation.

However, suppose the parents’ concern is, first and foremost, education itself. In that case, teachers need to impart a certain amount of knowledge to their children and, ideally, teach them how to use that knowledge in practice. How do “wedge” into the consciousness of the younger generation with some knowledge when there are so many exciting and distracting to the immature attention of schoolchildren?

And the same ways of perceiving information have changed a lot: paper books and magazines are displaced by electronic ones, instead of waiting for the needed movie on TV, it is easier to find it on YouTube, live communication is increasingly replaced by instant messaging through messengers and social networks. Of course, teachers, whose professionalism was formed when the Internet was unheard of, often find it challenging to convey the information they need so that students at least take note of it, let alone learn and remember it.

Today wowessays service will talk about pedagogical instructional Design, the task of which is precise to make the incomprehensible understandable, the complex accessible, the uninteresting exciting, and, in principle, to stimulate students’ desire for knowledge somehow. Let’s start with a bit of historical background.

What is Pedagogical Design: a Little History

There are several current definitions of such a concept as “pedagogical design.” It can be understood as a systematic approach to creating various learning technologies aimed at improving the quality of education and the complete assimilation of educational material.

In addition, pedagogical Design — is a whole science, the main task of which is to develop effective teaching methods using modern technology. There are courses for those wishing to master pedagogical Design, which teach how to “pack” a set of knowledge in a digestible format.

Teachers who graduate from pedagogical colleges and universities also need this knowledge because the Design of pedagogical programs is something teachers have to deal with daily, especially in the last couple of years with the onset of the pandemic and the mass transition to distance learning.

Where once the learning process had a clear and virtually unchanging framework for decades of instruction, things have changed. The familiar classroom-lesson system has been replaced by “distant learning,” or even simply asynchronous learning, in which the learner is studying when he or she has electricity and the Internet at home.

Initially, the niche of distance education mastered all kinds of courses: drawing, video editing, cutting, sewing, playing musical instruments, etc. Course developers yet 5–7 years ago saw the future, oriented themselves, “broke” the educational material into short blocks, made up video lessons on the principle of “one topic — one lesson,” and often not longer than 10–15 minutes, and for convenience even duplicated material in pdf-format with explanatory charts, diagrams, pictures and a list of additional literature. This is the Design of pedagogical programs.

With the beginning of the pandemic and the general “remoteness,” school teachers had to do something similar when it became clear that the “talking head” in Zoom was not quite identical to the live explanation of the lesson in class. At the very least, they had to think about designing the training material to deliver to the students without the usual live teaching.

However, for all the seeming novelty of such approaches, pedagogical Design’s foundations were laid as early as World War II. The American scientist Berres Frederick Skinner (1904–1990), known for his developments in the military field, was engaged, among other things, in improving the methodology of teaching soldiers in the military under time pressure.

The results of his research and conclusions can be found in his many-times reprinted book The Technology of Teaching. There, in particular, the principles of pedagogical Design that are still relevant today are outlined:

• The principle of informativeness.
• Principle of active learning.
• Principle of feedback.
• Principle of dosing the material.

Based on these principles, Burrus Frederick Skinner developed a step-by-step teaching methodology:

• Determine exactly what the learner needs to know or be able to do as a result of learning.
• Break down that amount of knowledge or skill into small blocks or small steps of mastery from simple to complex.
• See that the student learns each block or step in the sequence and reinforces the result.
• Design the learning process so that the student learns the material at each stage and has no gaps in knowledge and skills.
• Provide for periodic reinforcement of the learned material.

Pedagogical design models

There are several common instructional design models: ADDIE, SAM, Backward Design, and ALD. Let’s talk about each of them briefly.

ADDIE model

The name of the ADDIE model is made up of the first letters of the words denoting the main stages of its implementation. Let’s look at these stages:

• Analysis — a preparatory stage in which the goal is set, outlines the audience’s needs and the intended learning tools, control formats, and parameters for determining effectiveness.
• Design — course design with all its elements: plan, program, teaching materials, sets of training materials, and presentation formats.
• Development — implementation of a project in the form of a specific product: video and audio lessons, presentations, interactive questioning, and practical assignments.
• Implementation — transfer of ready-made course to the training platform, testing all its elements, and testing in practice.
• Evaluation — a comprehensive assessment of the course on the parameters of accessibility for understanding, efficiency, convenience, goal achievement, and need for improvement.

ADDIE is considered the basic and most commonly used model of instructional Design. However, other models are also used for more specific tasks.

SAM Model

The SAM model is an acronym for the Successive Approximation Model, which translates to the Successive Approximation Model. It is the opposite of ADDIE because, according to the SAM model, a course is not developed linearly from beginning to end but by constantly refining it according to emerging needs.

Let us clarify that approximation is the simplification of the complex to learn more effectively. In the context of pedagogical design practice, this means analysis, Design, and implementation, but repeatedly, until the course reaches the condition and “covers” the needs of any audience that comes with a request to study the material offered. Thus, the course is delivered according to the principle of minimal readiness, while some sections, chapters, or information are added along the way.

Schematically, the SAM model can be presented as follows:

• Preparation — gathering information and forming a common database for the entire course.
• Iterative Design — a kind of brainstorming where the collected data creates the basis for the course.
• Iterative Development: Increasing the course while adding new data needed during the design phase.
• Action Mapping — creating a model of the learner’s actions in acquiring knowledge and skills.

SAM model is perfect for designing short-term courses in disciplines for which there is a “here and now” demand and a minimum set of practical and monetizable knowledge is much stronger than some “perfect” in-depth courses covering all aspects of the topic.

The ALD Model

The name ALD is an acronym for Agile Learning Design. In our case, we should not take Agile in the classical sense but as an abbreviation for the designation of actions that fill this model:

• Align (aim) — define the goals and needs, and assess the necessary and available resources.
• Get set (get ready) — analyze the audience, determine the range of tasks, and think through the technological process.
• Iterate and implement — to revise and implement the material.
• Leverage — optimize resources and tools.
• Evaluate — to evaluate the work done and the results achieved.

As we see, there are many similarities with the models mentioned above, which is quite logical because all instructional design models are subordinated to one goal — improving education quality and maximizing the efficiency of mastering educational materials. However, some models stand out from the general framework of their approach.

Backward Design

Backward Design or reverse design model implies modeling the training course not from the beginning but … from the end. In other words, you must first determine what results in the learner should achieve as a result of training, by what criteria it will be clear that the result has been achieved, and then move on to the development of the course. This model is excellent if you want to teach something simple and applied.

Basic Principles of Visualizing Learning Materials

For anyone who undertakes to “design” the visual part of the course on their own, we recommend that you start by reading the article “Visualize correctly: why teachers need the skill of pedagogical design.” Here we will briefly outline the basic principles that, if followed, will make the material experience as comfortable and effective as possible.

Top 7 rules of visualization:

• F-pattern — remember that one’s gaze moves along a trajectory close to the outline of the letter F when only the first line is fully read, about to the middle of the second, and then the gaze slides until it “hooks” on something that catches the eye.
• Space and minimalism — the fewer elements on the sheet, the more attention is paid to each element, and vice versa.
• The rule of thirds — a person, subconsciously divides the picture into three parts horizontally and vertically and focuses on the intersections of the “dividing” lines.
• Gestalt or completeness effect — the picture should be perceived as logically complete, and its elements should not be out of place in the general logic of the image.
• Proximity effect — the adjacent elements are perceived as interconnected.
• Similarity effect — elements with similar characteristics (color, shape) are perceived as related.
• Multistability — the formed patterns of perception imprint the further interpretation of the image.

So, we have understood the concept of pedagogical Design and learned a lot about the technologies and models of pedagogical Design. This is a must-know for anyone receiving a pedagogical education: Design in education is becoming increasingly important.

Especially taking into account how the ways of perception of information have changed today, how densely the Internet, video and audio, remote work, and study have come into our lives, and how powerful “information noise” surrounds each of us from small to large every day.