Instructional Design for Intellectual Skills

In the course “Instructional Design and Development” that I am taking right now (Summer, 2007), we are reading through the book The Systematic Design of Instruction by Dick, Carey, and Carey. In Chapter 8, “Developing An Instructional Strategy,” the authors state that when an instructional designer is designing an instructional strategy for the knowledge domain called Intellectual Skills, that the designer should be aware of how learners have organized their entry knowledge in their memory. My thoughts on this is that maybe one of the ways of determining how a learner has organized their knowledge of a subject is to have them create a concept map of that knowledge.

The authors go on to say that the instructional strategy should provide ways for the learner to link new content to prerequisite knowledge that they have in their memory. They also state that the there should be direct instruction about the links and the relationships between the new knowledge and the existing knowledge. A concept map created by the instructor would be a very good way of illustrating the relationships.