From Motivation to Reverse Instructional Design

Jul 18, 2014 • Greg Wilson

[apologies for the brevity of this post — it’s been a rough couple of weeks…]

After people made their pitches (which was a lot of fun), we talked about the difference between formative and summative assessment, then took a brief look at reverse instructional design, which is the teaching equivalent of test-driven development. For our next exercise, I would like you each to come up with two questions or exercises you could use to tell whether or not someone has learned a short topic of your choice. The topic can be the one you made your pitch on, or something else entirely, but should be something you could teach in 10-15 minutes. One of the two questions must be a multiple-choice question (MCQ) with 4-5 answers (all of which should be plausible, only one of which should be right). The second can be any other kind of question or exercise, provided it’s something people could do in a few minutes at the end of a lesson.

Please do not post the answers to your questions. Instead, please try to answer several other people’s MCQ’s, and give them feedback on how clear the question was. If you’re suffering from writer’s block, please have a look at these submissions from previous cohorts.

There is no assigned chapter from How Learning Works this time around. Instead, I would like you to have a look at these four papers—we’ll be exploring these topics, and others, in the final rounds.

  1. Guzdial: Why Is It So Hard to Learn to Program?
  2. Crouch & Mazur: Peer Instruction: Ten Years of Experience and Results
  3. Labaree: The Winning Ways of a Losing Strategy: Educationalizing Social Problems in the United States
  4. Whitecraft & Williams: Why Aren’t More Women in Computer Science?