Product Description: Basic principles and practical strategies to promote learning in any setting!
From K-12 to corporate training settings––the Third Edition of Patricia Smith and Tillman Ragan’s thorough, research-based text equips you with the solid foundation you need to design instruction and environments that really facilitate learning.
Now updated to reflect the latest thinking in the field, this new edition offers not only extensive procedural assistance but also emphasizes the basic principles upon which most of the models and procedures in the instructional design field are built. The text presents a comprehensive treatment of the instructional design process, including analysis, strategy design, assessment, and evaluation.
Instructional Design This text was quite informative and covered everything. However, the layout of the text was boring. The font was small and each page had double columns which just made reading the material very arduous.
BORING but useful Why oh why haven't Smith and Ragan, experts in instruction, noticed that dry writing is not effective? Apparently they believe that dry impersonal writing is a model of proper academic voice. Sure, if the purpose of writing is to ensure that readers disengage as quickly as possible, then the style chosen does a wonderful job.
In addition, the text presumes that its audience are bottom-up learners and short-changes those of us that need a good hard look at the big picture before we can absorb the components thereof.
I can say one good thing about this text; it holds its resale value.
Prose to Sleep By This book did have good points, but they drown in a stagnant, dreary pool of monotonous prose that could put the heartiest of readers to sleep. Just imagine wading through page after page of sentences like this: "Closer attention to learners' cognitive processes during declarative knowledge learning has led us to realize that elaboration is a basic process by which links are made with information being received as well as for connecting new information to existing knowledge and structures" (161). Someone please rush the authors a copy of Richard Lanham's "Revising Prose".
Excellent source for online coursework In designing a course and a tutorial for to be taught online for the first time I used this text. I especially found the chapter on the affective component of course design helpful as students are very anxious initally with distance learning. I have subsequently used the book to retool my face-to-face classes. The examples and end-of-chapter sections are useful for new ideas and approaches.
Teaching Student's how to Learn, not what to Learn Beyond the fundamental Systematic Approach to Training process, Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation, the authors present proven strategies for teaching students how to learn. Problem-solving, delcarative knowledge, concepts, and principle scenarios are presented. This book is a valuable shelf reference for the K-12 teacher as well as the Instructional Technologist.
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