What is instructional strategy? Seeking hidden dimensions
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What is instructional strategy? Seeking hidden dimensions Andrew S. Gibbons1
© Association for Educational Communications and Technology 2020
Abstract Instructional strategy is defined in abstract terms independent of instructional theories, philosophies, or standard formulas. Strategies share dimensions in common that allow instructional designers to communicate about them in theory-agnostic terms. These dimensions supply a common reference for comparing design viewpoints and discussing their relative strengths and applicability. This definition simplifies the design of strategies. It provides a stable framework for the instructional designer, regardless of loyalty to a philosophy or theory. Examples show how theories about strategy compare with regard to the framework’s dimensions. Keywords Instructional systems design · Instructional design theory · Architectural theory of instructional design · Instructional theory · Instructional technology
Defining strategy There are many de facto definitions of instructional strategy existing in designed products, but where is the summary definition that brings consolidation and reconciliation to a topic that has thousands of examples but no existential center? Where is the interpretive key for typifying and comparing features and qualities of instructional strategies to allow designers of opposing views to speak a common design language despite their theoretic differences? This article proposes a functionally oriented and theory-agnostic characterization of instructional strategy that designers may find practically useful in the creation of plans for instructional strategy at all levels of a design. Many major works in the literature of instructional technology, cognitive psychology, the learning sciences, and social learning theory qualify as statements about instructional strategy. These works are major expressions of big ideas on learning and instruction and do not often introduce themselves as studies of “instructional strategy” per se. They take positions on major themes, so they do not address the implications of their ideas for the daily work of instructional designers, except tangentially. Therefore, though we have numerous descriptions of individual strategies, we have no common language for describing * Andrew S. Gibbons [email protected] 1
Instructional Psychology and Technology Department, McKay School of Education, Brigham Young University, 150‑A MCKB, Provo, UT 84602, USA
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independently what constitutes a strategy. This article’s goal is to build a model of an underlying unity that exists buried within this vast literature and to point out its practical importance. I propose twelve dimensions that provide a framework for the expression of instructional strategies (Fig. 1). These dimensions have been distilled from major works espousing theories or philosophies of instruction. It is proposed that a complete instructional strategy consists of plans in all twelve dimensions, including: (a) a set of time-defined ev
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