An Approach to the Psychology of Instruction

The relationship between a theory of learning and a theory of instruction is discussed. Examples are presented that illustrate how to proceed from a theoretical description of the learning process to the specification of an optimal strategy for carrying out instruction. The examples deal with fairly simple learning tasks and are admittedly of limited generality. Nevertheless, they clearly define the steps necessary for deriving and testing instructional strategies, thereby providing a set of procedures for analyzing more complex problems. The parameter-dependent optimization strategies are of particular importance because they take into account individual differences among learners as well as differences in difficulty among curriculum units. Experimental evaluations indicate that the parameter-dependent strategies lead to major gains in learning, when compared with strategies that do not take individual differences into account.