REFLECTIONS ON GAGNE’S EVENTS OF INSTRUCTION

REFLECTIONS ON GAGNE’S EVENTS OF INSTRUCTION

The following are some blog excerps I came across discussing the pros and cons of Gagne’s Events of Instruction.

Donald Clark says:
Banal and dull
First, much of this is banal – get their attention, elicit performance, give feedback, assess. It’s also an instructional ladder that leads straight to Dullsville, a straightjacket that strips away any sense of build and wonder, almost guaranteed to bore more than enlighten. What other form of presentation would give the game away at the start. Would you go to the cinema and expect to hear the objectives of the film before you start? It’s time we moved on from this old and now dated theory using what we’ve learnt about the brain and the clever use of media.



Geetha Krishnan said...
Great post, Don! My first response was "Ouch, That hurt!" I wonder: Is the problem with the commandments themselves? Or is it with the way instructional designers treat them as one more set of check boxes to be ticked away in the design process?

May be it is worthwhile to rephrase / modify the commandments in view of today's media and today's learners?

Mark Frank said...
Uhm

Seems to me that you are blaming Gagne because designers either miss out of some of the steps or do them poorly. Most of the commandments look like pretty good practice to me. You just need to do them well. 


Donald Clark said...
Two good points.

Geetha's point about modifying the nine steps has virtues but I suspect new theory has taken us well beyond these steps into much more media savvy territory. It would be better to focus on what we now know about memory, cognitive overload and how screen-based media actually works, than outdated instructional theory.

Mark - your take is fine. I'm not blaming Gagne personally. I do think his method is primitive and states the obvious, that's why it's easy to defend as 'good practice'. The blame is clearly on those 'instructional design' and 'train the trainer' courses which are full of old, non-empirical theory - Bloom, Gagne, Learning Styles, Kirkpatrick etc. Unfortunately, for gagne and otehrs, these steps are seen as a sequential ladder and the oder can't be shifted around. Designers don't really apply games techniques in their instructional designs, yet games designers have much to teach us on motivation, reinforcement, paced and personalised learning. My point is that his list mostly leads to bad, and not good, practice. The 'Gagne'led instructional designers I've worked with lacked creativity and a communication skills - they dumbed down content.

Clive Shepherd said...
As you suggest, Gagne's 'commandments' do seem rather restrictive and old-fashioned. I think that's because they envision only one over-arching teaching/learning strategy, i.e. structured instruction. Much classroom training and the majority of self-study e-learning falls into this category, more because it's a default option, than because it has been consciously chosen. I believe structured instruction has a role to play, particularly with more dependent learners and where the outcomes have to be clearly demonstrated. Most of Gagne's commandments seem well suited to this approach, although not necessarily in this strict order. As others have commented already, it isn't enough for the guidelines to be followed, they have to be executed well (and that requires real communication skills and some imagination).

But, of course, there are other srategies, including simple exposition, guided discovery and exploration/collaboration in an informal setting.

It seems that, yet again, I am the championing the cause of not throwing out the baby with the bath water. So often, good ideas are let down by poor implementation.


Clark Quinn said...
The interpretation of Gagne' is wrong, but as Donald points out, you also don't need to follow the order. For instance, the practice problem itself can be the attention getter (as in games). I'll immodestly point to my book Engaging Learning as a treatise on how to design learning that actually accomplishes Gagne's goals in a radically different way. And the principles apply even when you don't have the resources for a full game engine.
The point is, the original principles behind the nine elements are right, but not necessarily the order, and certainly not most interpretations of them.

Mike Maroney said...
Having worked at Epic when Donald was CEO can I just say that designers also felt constrained by certain things – the biggest being that clients never wanted to spend the money that would enable us to implement any design that had the slightest chance of being engaging. My favorite being a client who wanted a cutting edge game design – for £25,000! The need to keep costs down to remain competitive always impacted the design. It’s only going to change when e-learning isn’t seen as a short term cheap option.

Anonymous said...
Interesting points. It's always useful to understand the context within which these theories are created. In Gagne's case,that context was military performance and training. 



Donald Clark said...
Note that this was one of the few White Papers I did not write at Epic. There were up to 200 people working at Epic and a few were traditional Gagne types - they tended to be the duller, functional designers. The talented designers, in my experience, regarded all the Gagne stuff as irrelevant. We learnt to keep the 'Gagne' people away from the innovative projects.