Task Analysis Methods for Instructional Design

David H. Jonassen, Martin Tessmer, Wallace H. Hannum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781135674816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Task Analysis Methods for Instructional Design is a handbook of task analysis and knowledge elicitation methods that can be used for designing direct instruction, performance support, and learner-centered learning environments. To design any kind of instruction, it is necessary to articulate a model of how learners should think and perform. This book provides descriptions and examples of five different kinds of task analysis methods:
*job/behavioral analysis;
*learning analysis;
*cognitive task analysis;
*activity-based analysis methods; and
*subject matter analysis. Chapters follow a standard format making them useful for reference, instruction, or performance support.

Part I

Task Analysis Processes

Introduction

In Part I of this book, we argue that task analysis is the most important albeit most often misunderstood and ineffectively performed process in instructional design. Instructional design is an analytic activity, and task analysis is the key to the process. Why? Because instructional design is premised on an inviolable assumption. The nature of instruction and assessment that we use to foster learning should be congruent with the nature of the learning required. Therefore, instructional and assessment strategies vary with the nature of the learning outcome. That is, different learning outcomes require different forms of assessment and different kinds of instructional or learning strategies to foster them. An essential skill of instructional designers, then, is the articulation of the kinds of learning outcomes for which they are assisting learners (i.e. task analysis). So, if you, as an instructional designer, are unable to articulate those learning outcomes (if you cannot describe how learners should be able to think and perform), how will you be able to design instruction or assessment?

Part I of this book describes the processes and underlying assumptions of the task analysis process. Chapter 1 articulates our assumptions about the task analysis process and then describes the important functions that are performed by task analysts. It concludes by providing some heuristics for selecting the task analysis methods that are described in Part II–VI of the book.

Chapter 2 more clearly describes an important function of task analysis - selecting which tasks or skills that have been identified by the process for further analysis. Why is this important? Because there are far more tasks and learning outcomes that need to be learned in any context than can be designed and developed. There are insufficient instructional designers, time, and resources to design and develop instruction or learning environments for every learning outcome. So we must often select the most important learning outcomes for development. Chapter 2 describes the criteria for making those selections and the process for applying those criteria.

Another important function of task analysis is to describe the learning requirements for any task or skill being analyzed. How do learners have to think? What do they have to know? How do they have to perform? Chapter 3 presents our taxonomy of learning outcomes that may be used to classify the kinds of learning that your task analysis identifies. Again, if we assume that instruction and assessment strategies need to be congruent with learning outcomes, then we need a way to differentiate those outcomes. Chapter 3 presents a method for doing that.

Part I of this book includes the following chapters:

1 What is Task

2 Selecting Tasks for Analysis

3 Classifying Knowledge and Skills from Task Analysis

Chapter 1

What is Task Analysis?

Purpose of Task Analysis

“The first step in the design of any instruction is a task analysis to determine what should be taught” (Poison, 1993, p. 219). Task analysis for instructional design is a process of analyzing and articulating the kind of learning that you expect the learners to know how to perform. Instructional designers perform task analysis in order to determine:

• the goals and objectives of learning

• the operational components of jobs, skills, learning goals or objectives, that is, to describe what task performers do, how they perform a task or apply a skill and how they think before, during, and after learning

• what knowledge states (declarative, structural, and procedural knowledge) characterize a job or task

• which tasks, skills, or goals ought to be taught, that is, how to select learning outcomes that are appropriate for instructional development

• which tasks are most important - which have priority for a commitment of training resources

• the sequence in which tasks are performed and should be learned and taught.

• how to select or design instructional activities, strategies, and techniques to foster learning

• how to select appropriate media and learning environments

• how to construct performance assessments and evaluation

In order to design instruction that will support learning, it is essential that we understand the nature of the tasks that learners will be performing. This is true whether you are designing traditional, direct-instruction or problem-based constructivist learning environments. If you are unable to articulate the ways that you want learners to think and the act, how can you believe that you can design instruction that will help them?

Assumptions of Task Analysis

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This book is premised on a few important assumptions.

Task analysis is essential to good instructional design. Intellectually and practically, task analysis is probably the most important part of the instructional systems design (ISD) process, and it has been thought so for some time. “If I were faced with the problem of improving training, I should not look for much help from the well-known learning principles like reinforcement, distribution of practice, response familiarity, and so on. I should look instead at the technique of task analysis, and at the principles of component task achievement, intratask transfer, and the sequencing of subtask learning to find those ideas of greatest usefulness in the design of effective learning” (Gagne, 1963). Task analysis provides the intellectual foundation for instructional design. It guides the process by articulating the goal or mission for the design process. Nearly every one of the instructional design models that were listed by Andrews and Goodson (1980), which is the most comprehensive list of ISD procedures, includes some task analysis process. Some prominent design models ignore task analysis, relying (we suppose) on inspiration to direct the design process. We have seen too many instructional design projects fail to produce effective instruction or learning because the designers did not understand the learning outcomes.

Although task analysis emerged as a process in the behaviorist era of instructional design, task analysis methods have followed the paradigm shifts to cognitive psychology and onto constructivism. We argue that task analysis is just as important to the design of constructivist learning environments as it is to direct instruction, performance support systems, or any other form of learning support. Obviously, designing learning environments to support constructive learning requires different analysis methods. However, whether designing programmed instruction, intelligent tutoring systems, or constructivist learning environments, designers must understand the nature of the learning they are directing, guiding, or supporting (depending on your philosophical perspective).

Task analysis is the least understood component of the instructional design process. Instructional design, as a process, is often generically described by the ADDIE Model—Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (Gustafson & Branch, 1997). Of those processes, implementation is probably the most poorly performed, however the analysis procedures are most often under-performed. Although analysis procedures, including needs analysis, learner analysis, context analysis (Tessmer & Richey, 1997) and task analysis are taught in most preparation programs, most instructional designers possess insufficient skills in performing task analysis methods. They learn about task analysis, but they too seldom do task analysis. Most programs provide insufficient design cases and practice in performing task analyses. When they do, they most often teach a single method. Probably two thirds of all task analyses that are conducted in practice use some form of procedural analysis, so most instruction is procedurally oriented despite the cognitive needs of the learner. Procedural analysis is the methode de jour not because it is the most appropriate, but because that is the only method the designers know. The primary purpose of this book is to show designers that there are numerous, more appropriate, and effective methods for conducting task analysis.

The apparent ambiguity of task analysis results from a lack of clear conceptions about the task analysis process. For instance, some (Miller, 1962) have argued that task analysis is an art, and as an art, is most dependent upon the skill of the task analyst. If task analysis is to be conceived of and performed scientifically, then some predictability needs to be added to the decision making process. Military and corporate operations reject the artistic conception, claiming that task analysis is a series of operations that must be performed in a consistent manner (too often defaulting to the procedural).

The ambiguity of task analysis also results from the confusing array of methods for performing it. Zemke and Kramlinger (1982) described the five most common ways of doing task analysis: the look-and-see (observation) approach, structure-of-the knowledge (hierarchical analysis) approach, critical incident approach, the process/decision flowchart (information processing) approach, and the use of consumer research techniques (surveying, interviewing). In this book we describe these and many other task analysis methods.

Task analysis also appears ambiguous because there are so many applications that result in so many methods. Task analysis, in some form, is performed by personnel psychologists, human factors engineers (including human-computer interaction designers, occupational safety inspectors, and many others), curriculum developers, and, of course, instructional designers. Task analysis is recognized as an essential process in the design of human-computer interactions (Diaper, 1989). However, most of the methods used to design human-computer interactions focus on specific, procedural tasks to support computer interfaces and so do not transfer to instructional design. Task analysis methods for instructional design are relatively specific to instructional design.

The ambiguity of task analysis also results from the myriad of contextual constraints imposed by the setting in which the analysis is being...