Instructional Design and Technology (IDT) professionals practice their skills in a broad range of career environments and job roles. The resulting collection of competency lists and wide range of practice environments, coupled with the frequent changes that have always characterized the field, produce complexity that is difficult to communicate to…

Both principals and school districts hire literacy coaches with the clear hope that they will succeed in improving teachers' instruction and, in turn, students' literacy learning. Unintentionally, however, they can overlook putting into place supports that coaches themselves may need to reach these goals. This Literacy Coaching Clearinghouse brief…

The University of Chicago's Joseph Regenstein Library Bookstacks Department has used process mapping and continuous improvement to successfully improve its overall operations. The most recent efforts focus on Lean manufacturing, an initiative centered on eliminating waste in manufacturing processes. The conversion of the Bookstacks Department from…

Teacher educators have a dual responsibility. They must not only deliver the content of their courses but also model the pedagogical beliefs and instructional strategies they espouse. Perhaps no area more explicitly demonstrates the difference between "talking the talk" and "walking the walk" than the integration of technology into teacher…

The conceptualization and measurement of key job characteristics has not changed greatly for most social scientists since the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and Quality of Employment surveys were created, despite their recognized limitations. However, debates over the roles of job skill requirements, technology, and new management practices in…

What makes a classroom "smart"? Presentation technologies such as projectors, document cameras, and LCD panels clearly fit the bill, but when considering other technologies for teaching, learning, and developing content, the possibilities become limited only by the boundaries of an institution's innovation. This article presents 32 best practices…

Connectivity has dramatically changed the landscape of higher education IT. From "on-demand" services for net-gen students and advanced eLearning systems for faculty, to high-performance computing grid resources for researchers, IT now provides more networked services than ever to connect campus constituents to each other and to the world.…

The purposes of the current study were to (1) determine the relationship between the number of practice strategies students could articulate and their performance improvement scores, (2) identify trends in students' 5-minute practice behaviors, and (3) compare students' achievement based on their practice procedures. Participants were 65 eighth…

Successful performance improvement efforts draw from such disciplines as psychology and systems theory, and from the fields of instructional design and human resource development. Both knowledge management and organizational learning are valuable additions to the human performance technologist's repertoire for performance analysis and intervention…

Describes a systematic approach to selecting instructional designs, discussing performance analysis, gaps, elements (inputs, conditions, process, outputs, consequences, feedback), matrices, changes in performance state (establishing, improving, maintaining, and extinguishing performance), intervention interference, and involving others in…

Proposes that object-oriented (OO) analysis, design, and programming methods, currently having a major impact on computing, will play an increasing role in shaping the paradigms of performance technology--particularly in instructional design (ID). Ties this crossover of OO from computing to ID to design trends and ongoing research in ID. (AEF)

Discusses software design for enterprise systems and for video games, and describes difficulties with enterprise tools, including interface complexity, training costs, and user frustration. Examines the world of tools and games from the human perspective and suggests ways in which game design can be successfully transferred to the enterprise tool…

Describes the use of small-scale change projects by Philadelphia's Department of Human Services to generate new outcomes and new skills and experience that improved basic day-to-day operations, strategic planning, and cumulatively produced larger-scale changes in service, financing, and performance. (Author/LRW)

Performance improvement practitioners can be stymied to solve clients' problems. Clients may fail to recognize problems, would rather address symptoms than root causes and practitioners unable to convince clients to institute a meaningful solution. Practitioner can use internally developed data to build a case for action, create a clear vision of…

Discusses high-involvement work teams, in which groups of workers participate in improving their work activities; describes how a typical work team progresses through a project; and introduces a systems model of interrelated steps through which teams may progress to solve problems. (LRW)