Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction and Merrill First Principles

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1. Gain attention

In order for any learning to take place, you must first capture the attention of the student. A multimedia program that begins with an animated title screen sequence accompanied by sound effects or music startles the senses with auditory or visual stimuli. An even better way to capture students' attention is to start each lesson with a thought-provoking question or interesting fact. Curiosity motivates students to learn.

2. Inform learners of objectives

Early in each lesson students should encounter a list of learning objectives. This initiates the internal process of expectancy and helps motivate the learner to complete the lesson. These objectives should form the basis for assessment and possible certification as well. Typically, learning objectives are presented in the form of "Upon completing this lesson you will be able to. . . ." The phrasing of the objectives themselves will be covered under Robert Mager's contributions later in this chapter.

3. Stimulate recall of prior learning

Associating new information with prior knowledge can facilitate the learning process. It is easier for learners to encode and store information in long-term memory when there are links to personal experience and knowledge. A simple way to stimulate recall is to ask questions about previous experiences, an understanding of previous concepts, or a body of content.

4. Present the content

This event of instruction is where the new content is actually presented to the learner. Content should be chunked and organized meaningfully, and typically is explained and then demonstrated. To appeal to different learning modalities, a variety of media should be used if possible, including text, graphics, audio narration, and video.

5. Provide "learning guidance"

To help learners encode information for long-term storage, additional guidance should be provided along with the presentation of new content. Guidance strategies include the use of examples, non-examples, case studies, graphical representations, mnemonics, and analogies.

6. Elicit performance (practice)

In this event of instruction, the learner is required to practice the new skill or behavior. Eliciting performance provides an opportunity for learners to confirm their correct understanding, and the repetition further increases the likelihood of retention.

7. Provide feedback

As learners practice new behavior it is important to provide specific and immediate feedback of their performance. Unlike questions in a post-test, exercises within tutorials should be used for comprehension and encoding purposes, not for formal scoring. Additional guidance and answers provided at this stage are called formative feedback.

8. Assess performance

Upon completing instructional modules, students should be given the opportunity to take (or be required to take) a post-test or final assessment. This assessment should be completed without the ability to receive additional coaching, feedback, or hints. Mastery of material, or certification, is typically granted after achieving a certain score or percent correct. A commonly accepted level of mastery is 80% to 90% correct.

9. Enhance retention and transfer to the job

Determining whether or not the skills learned from a training program are ever applied back on the job often remains a mystery to training managers - and a source of consternation for senior executives. Effective training programs have a "performance" focus, incorporating design and media that facilitate retention and transfer to the job. The repetition of learned concepts is a tried and true means of aiding retention, although often disliked by students. (There was a reason for writing spelling words ten times as grade school student.) Creating electronic or online job-aids, references, templates, and wizards are other ways of aiding performance.

Merrill First Principles of Instruction   

First principles

According to Merrill, a learner’s experience should center around solving a problem and should involve four phases.

Phase 1. Activation of prior knowledge

Before you recoil in horror because this invokes Gagné and you’ve already consigned him to your rubbish bin, what Merrill describes is fairly straightforward. If there’s no relevant past experience connected to the problem, the instructor tries to find an example or context that’s relevant to the learner, i.e., some way of demonstrating that the learner will benefit from the knowledge/skills about to be imparted.  The point here is to encourage learners to start to organize the knowledge they’re going to gain using their own relevant frameworks.

Phase 2. Demonstration Here, Merrill urges instructional designers to ask the following questions: Does the courseware demonstrate what is to be learned rather than merely telling information about what is to be learned? Are the demonstrations consistent with the instructional goals? Is learner guidance employed? Do [the] media enhance learning? These questions acknowledge the importance of experiential design based on a foundation of learning cues provided by the instructor

Phase 3. Application

It’s important for the learner to practice skills that are relevant to solving the real-world problem the learner is faced with. Merrill urges providing “a varied sequence of problems” with the instructor providing the learner with less and less guidance as knowledge/skills are acquired.

Phase 4. Integration

Though this may put you in mind of Gagné again,  this is a worthwhile phase to retain. Essentially, the instructor should include aids or techniques that encourage transfer of learning to the job. Transfer is enhanced when learners actively reflect on what they’ve learned and adapt their knowledge/skills to their own personal work challenges.

For my lesson I would show how learning about Jamestown effect real world decisions in the current world.  I would start the lesson with questions to the student to recall prior knowledge.  Such as “Why would explorers risk their life to come to a new world?”   If you were alive at the time would come to a new world (personalize the question)?  I would next show a video with audio and graphics.

Next teacher woudl asks students alot of questions to check for understanding with accurate answers with detail reason for answer being right or wrong.  Next student would have to create a powerpoint, cartoon, or project based on Jamestown.