Active learning classrooms provide an ideal opportunity to develop key workplace skills such as teamwork, information processing, critical thinking, and problem solving. Although many active learning pedagogies implicitly support student development of these skills, the role of the instructor in explicitly prompting and assessing these skills in…

Many libraries offer for-credit courses that intend to foster information literacy. These courses will be strengthened if the librarian as instructor has a familiarity with learning theory. This article suggests that Robert Gagne's "Nine Events of Instruction," based on information processing theory, can provide support to bibliographic…

Perkins, a professor of Education at Harvard University, promoted the use of constructivism in conjunction with information processing technologies to facilitate students' understanding and active use of knowledge and skills. He identified five facets of a learning environment including: information banks, symbol pads, construction kits,…

A prescriptive theory of teaching based upon an information processing model of human functioning is outlined. Based on teaching functions, defined as necessary conditions of learning, a general teaching algorithm is presented and its use demonstrated. (Author/MT)

Discussion of the diffusion of interactive communications innovations focuses on the integration of telecomputing tools into precollege curricula. Topics include the telecomputing teacher as instructional designer; a models approach to instructional design; and telecomputing activity structures, including interpersonal exchanges, information…

Designing effective instruction is the goal of any instructional designer. This article discusses how lesson design can be enhanced by incorporating certain fundamentals of cognitive psychology. The stages of human information processing and a typical four-step lesson are integrated in a model that can inform instructional design. (Contains 1…

There is an emphasis on meaningmaking, problem solving, and discovery in contemporary educational settings--facts and concepts integrated into the curriculum by unifying themes that connect to real-world experiences. Using graphics to represent the thinking of students in learning and the thinking of teachers in integrated planning can be…

Visual learning has long been recognized as an integral process in educating biology undergraduates, who must develop specific visual skills and knowledge in order to communicate and work in the extensive visual culture shared by practicing biologists. Student experiences with field observations and the development and application of verbal/visual…

An illustration of modestly-interactive instruction of moderate length--to be administered to six students who start off together--is presented. Implications for IDCMS regarding number of audio programs and video files and extent of looping are preliminarily deduced on the basis of characteristics of the illustrative instructional program.…

An approach to skills analysis is described in which strategy and processing skills sufficient for task performance are represented as an information-processing routine. Each step in the routine is viewed as a utilization of a processing mechanism or primary process. Definitions of these processes represent hypotheses about the psychological…

For the benefit of administrators and instructors, individualized instruction and the role of computers in managing it are outlined. Structural components of individualized instructional programs are identified, and the process of individualized instruction is described. A review of major computer-managed instructional (CMI) systems is provided,…