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Computer-Based Instruction: Design and Development

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This book is an authoritative compendium of instructional design practices applied to computer-based instruction, including web-based training (WBT). Drawing heavily from M.D. Merrill's Component Display Theory and ID2 project, the book has strong chapters on instructional strategies for each of the major types of learning. It also has good treatments of basic design practices for tutorial and simulation CBT design.

This book focuses on the different instructional strategies that should be used when teaching procedures, processes, concepts, principles, and memory instruction. The core idea being that the best way to teach people about concepts is different than teaching people about a procedure. And that teaching people to memorize a list is very different from teaching principle-using behavior, and that the methods used to teach each type of learning are different.

To help you understand what the book is like, here is some quotes about using instructional strategy to teach a process:

A process is a pattern of events. Procedural processes describe the influences and effects of a procedure as it is performed, from a third-person point of view. When procedure and process instruction are combined, a student learns to perform the procedure while at the same time learning how the procedure affects the environment in which the procedure is performed.(P.222)

...Process knowledge is comprised of several possible event paths which events might follow depending on how conditions vary. The most superficial degree of process knowledge consists of memorizing the steps in a process.(P.225)

Most explanations in science textbooks are delivered in the form of long paragraphs in which several process threads are intertwined, and only a few event paths out of the large number possible are presented, and a limited amount of information is given to help a student determine the other paths that might occur.

Missing information may include missing events, incomplete description of the mechanisms for transition between event-states, confusing presentation of the mechanism, lacking specification of the conditions under which state-transitions take place, or lack of linkage between condition causes and event effects. (P.226)

For process-using behavior to occur, a student must not only predict an outcome, but must also be able to supply a rationale for it. The student must be able to explain through a chain of reasoning why and how the outcome occurred.
We have been careful to describe a process as a pattern of events and not as a sequence of events; now it is possible to see why. As natural elements are acted upon by all kinds of forces, energies, and signals, there are many forces acting at once, and so there are many possible outcomes depending on the forces acting, their magnitude, and their balance. Any set of circumstances can thus result in a large number of outcomes, depending on the final resolution of the forces. That means that a process as we experience it is not a fixed, rigid, unchanging sequence of events, but a possiblity with numerous outcomes - numerous possible event sequences. Process-using means being able to predict from a given set of elements and acting forces one or more possible outcomes. Process-using behavior deals in the cause-effect linkages between events and explains them in terms of force, energy, or signal transfer between related elements. (p.226)


The nature of process instruction requires much stage setting. The difference in the requirements for environment description for novices and experts is the key to an important principle for all of process instruction. Process instruction, more than any other type of instruction, is prone to great compression. For process instruction, the instructional message can sometimes be compressed into a few words if the audience for the instruction is experienced and already has a great deal of knowledge in the content. For novices, the explanations must be detailed and explicit - sometimes painfully so. (P.235)