Feedback for Practice Exercises:
1. Instructional designers should ask themselves, "What will students be doing after they have
learned?"
2. Target objectives are those objectives to be attained at the end of a course of study.
3. Enabling objectives are prerequisites of target objectives -- those that are attained during a
course of study.
4. The course purpose statement should be concerned with what a student should be able to do
after a course of study.
5. Information-processing or procedural task analysis: describes the steps in the sequence of
performing a task or skill. The sequence includes choice and alternative actions.
Learning task analysis: identifies the skills necessary to perform each step of the
information-processing analysis. The learning task analysis may uncover objectives which
are not taught in the information-processing analysis, but which are required to transfer the
newly learned skill to other problems.
6. A prerequisite skill is learned prior to the target skill and enables the learning of the target
objective.
7. An essential prerequisite is a component skill that must be learned before completely
learning a target skill. A supportive prerequisite may be helpful in learning a target objective quicker or with less effort, but is not absolutely required.
8. A learning hierarchy is the product of a learning task analysis for intellectual skills. It displays the target skill broken down into successively simpler skills.
9. A flow chart makes it possible to specify the presentation sequence of the target
performance. The revelation of steps that require internal processing as well as overt
behavior is important in specifying the steps of the procedure.
10. The "steps" of an information-processing analysis are what an individual does in exhibiting
a target performance that may be assumed to have been learned previously. "Subordinate
skills" of a learning task analysis are those skills that an individual must learn in sequence
from the simplest to the most complex.
11. For a given target objective, a designer should ask himself a question similar to the
following: "What simpler intellectual skill or skills would a learner have to acquire to learn
this target objective?"
12. Cognitive strategies may help in learning intellectual skills faster. Also, they may make
intellectual skills easier to remember or aid in generalizing to novel instances.
13. An instructional curriculum map indicates the functional relationships among both essential
and supportive instructional objectives. It differs from an instructional skills hierarchy in
that it contains objectives from many different domains of learning (as opposed to
objectives from only the intellectual skills domain).
14. Verbal information objectives may be very useful as supportive objectives for intellectual
skill learning, but research does not support their use as essential prerequisites. In contrast,
sub-ordinate intellectual skills are essential for learning upper-level intellectual skills.
15. Integrated goals are conceived as incorporating rather than supplanting the various types of
instructional outcomes (facts, concepts, rules, strategies). Gagne and Merrill (1990) jointly
conceptualized a requirement for instructional design that identified learning goals based
upon multiple integrated objectives as they occur in lessons and courses.
16. An enterprise is a complex activity in which the human is engaged, made possible through
the integration of multiple objectives. For its execution, an enterprise may depend upon
some combination of verbal information, intellectual skills, and cognitive strategies, all
related by their involvement in the common goal.
17.
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
(MS) motor skills
(A) attitudes
(CS) cognitive strategies
(IS) intellectual skills
(VI) verbal information
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
(VI) verbal information
(CS) cognitive strategies
(A) attitudes
(MS) motor skills
(IS) intellectual skills
18.
Criteria for Evaluating the Application Exercises:
1. Learning Hierarchy Criteria
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Did you work backwards from the target skill in order to reveal simpler components
that make it possible for the learner to master the target skill?
Does every rule break down to at least two other rules, a rule and concept, or two
other concepts?
Do concepts consist of simpler concepts or discriminations?
Are all objectives in the learning hierarchy intellectual skills?
Is the target skill broken down into successively simpler steps?
2. Instructional Map Criteria
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Is the map identified as a course, unit or lesson map?
Are the relationships among the objectives in the map supportive? (Do the lower level
skills support learning the higher level skills? Do objectives from a different domain
support objectives coming later in sequence?)
Have you shown verbal information objectives that support the intellectual skills?
What attitudes are functionally related to the intellectual skill target objective?
Are there motor skills that may be used to facilitate learning of the target skill or can they

be ignored?
Have you diagrammed domain changes in ways that indicate functional
relationships among all the objectives?
An example of a learning hierarchy from a student project by Ed Lagman
An example of an instructional curriculum map from a student project by Dave Proulx