Instructional Principles and Hypotheses

Creating Instructional Principle and Hypothesis Pages

The PSLC is starting to maintain a collection of instructional principle pages. Each instructional principle page should be structured with the following headers:

1. Brief statement of principle
2. Description of principle
   1. Operational definition
   2. Examples
3. Experimental support
   1. Level of support (either low, medium, or high) (See the recent IES practice guide on "Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning" for definitions of levels of support.)
   2. Laboratory experiment support
   3. In vivo experiment support
4. Theoretical rationale (these entries should link to one or more learning processes)
5. Conditions of application
6. Caveats, limitations, open issues, or dissenting views
7. Variations (descendants)
8. Generalizations (ascendants)
9. References

If you have a study page, your hypothesis section should make reference to at least one of these instructional principle pages. You should edit your hypothesis section to be sure it points to an instructional principle page. Then you should edit that instructional principle page so that it 1) at least has the structure above (even if all sections aren't filled in) and 2) fill in or edit sections so they are consistent with your views. A template you can copy is provided further below.

We want to keep the number of principles down, at least at the highest level if generalization, so try to reference the most general instructional principle that is appropriate. In addition to facilitating our goal of greater shared vocabulary and unification, doing so will also make it so you have less editing work to do! By pointing to more general instructional principles, others will be contributing to structuring and filling in that page in addition to you. You may also point to (from your hypothesis section) more specific instructional principle pages relevant to your study.

Be sure that the *Examples* and *Experimental Support* sections of the instructional principle page you point to also points back to your study page.

Please also add references to the literature outside of PSLC to the *Reference* section of instructional principles pages you edit. You might simply copy these from your study page's reference section and/or papers your write. By doing so, you can help others (and others can help you) identify relevant research in the field.

Generalization hierarchy of Instructional Principles and Hypotheses

From Category:Instructional Principle

• Example-rule coordination principle
  • Worked example principle
  • Prompted self-explanation hypothesis
    • Corrective self-explanation
• Optimized scheduling

List of independent variables that could become principles

From Category:Independent Variables

Cross-cutting all 3 clusters

• Tutoring feedback
  • Peer tutoring
  • Prompted Self-explanation

Coordinative Learning

• Corrective self-explanation
• Visual-verbal integration
  • Contiguous Representation
• Feature focusing

Interactive Communication

• Collaboration
  • Peer tutoring
• Collaboration scripts
• Collaboratively observe
  • Vicarious learning
• Deep/Reflection questions. (NOTE: See the recent IES practice guide on "Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning" as a great source for relevant references. See particularly the "deep questioning" recommendation (written primarily by Art Graesser).)
  • Reflection questions
    • Post-practice reflection
  • deep-level questions
  • Knowledge Construction Dialogues
  • Prompted Self-explanation
    • Elaborated Explanations - should this be a learning process (something a student does) rather than an instructional method (something instruction does)? "Prompting for X" can make a learning process into an instructional method (whether the method works or not is a separate question).
    • Jointly constructed explanation - also perhaps a learning process?
• Instructional explanation

Refinement and Fluency

• Error correction support
• Explicit instruction
• Fluency Pressure
• Feedback Timing in matrix, but not in glossary.
• Feature focusing
• Knowledge Accessibility in matrix, but not in glossary. See Accessibility

Unclassified

• Assistance
• Availability
• Fading
• Implicit instruction
• Instructional method
• Scaffolding

Template

You can copy the following into an instructional principle page you want to edit and then insert existing text into appropriate sections and add text in other sections.

==Brief statement of principle==
==Description of principle==
===Operational definition===
===Examples===
==Experimental support==
===Laboratory experiment support===
===In vivo experiment support===
==Theoretical rationale== 
(These entries should link to one or more [[:Category:Learning Processes|learning processes]].)
==Conditions of application==
==Caveats, limitations, open issues, or dissenting views==
==Variations (descendants)==
==Generalizations (ascendants)==
==References==
[[Category:Glossary]]
[[Category:Instructional Principle]]

A (temporary!) note on editing instructional principles and hypotheses pages

An instruction principle is usually so closely related to an independent variable that it is hard to tell them apart. An instruction principle is a general hypothesis, usually about how one instructional method is better than some other baseline or control method. For example, Mayer's multimedia principle states that using diagrams in text (one instructional method) leads to better learning than text alone (another instructional method) under certain circumstances. When a study varies the instructional method, then the instruction method a kind of independent variable, so in this wiki, they are usually described on independent variable wiki pages. However, an instructional principle is often so closely related to one of its independent variables/methods that the two wiki pages share considerable content. If so, then maybe it would be best to just have one page for both. Let's just start in and see how it turns out.

If you do choose to use separate pages for an instructional principle and a related independent variable, please put "principle" or "hypothesis" in the title of the instructional principle. For instance, the Worked example principle page is different from but related to the worked examples page. The Prompted self-explanation hypothesis page is different from the Prompted Self-explanation page.

Instructional principles are related to the *hypothesis* section of study pages. The hypothesis of a study may be more study- or domain-specific whereas the associated instructional principle will be study-neutral and likely more domain general. Therefore, the wiki page documenting a project or study should have:

• an independent variables section that refers to the wiki pages of general independent variables. These are found in the column headers of the matrix that appears on your cluster's page.

• a hypothesis section that refers to the wiki pages of general instructional principles. These instructional principles should reference the general independent variables mentioned above.

If some of the structure above does not exist, please create it.

Learning Processes

Here's a (probably incomplete) list of learning processes with entries in the glossary. These should be used in the "theoretical rationale" section of instructional principles pages.

Co-training, Cognitive headroom, Integration, Refinement, Sense making, self-explanation

A potentially different list of learning processes can be found at Category:Learning Processes.