Kroog's Blog

Learner Analysis

As an instructional designer, how do you provide learner analysis throughout the phases of instruction?

Already I have so many ideas of what I could do for my classroom with the design process. I would love to start with a Holocaust project for my students. In the "defining" phase, I woud start out by collecting infomation about my learners. This is fairly easy since I have taught a year and a half of middle school and I interact with them on a daily basis. However, this collection of data is usually contrived so I could have completed this step as I trained for teaching in Ed Psych courses.
In the "design" phase, I could continue to collect learner data by delving futher into a middle school student. Maybe at this point I interview a few previous students to ask them what I could add to my Holocaust unit to make it more interesting and connect with them better. I could also observe other teachers as they taught a similar unit to seventh graders. Then I would sit down with possible acitivities for my project and figure out implications of both (for instance, will the activity be too involved for the student? Will it go over their heads? Do I need more personalized information for them?)
After this phase I will actually test out a prototype. Again, I could rely on past students for this, but most likely for the time constraint I am under, this will be my current students testing out my prototype and giving me feedback for next year's class.
After I receive feedback (and this could be from current or past students) I will field test the product to see its effectiveness in learning. Maybe the first prototype I gave to my past student volunteers and now in this stage I allow my current students to try it out. This way, I have almost the finished product to show them, but am still allowed to make changes before I allow other teachers in the building to use it with their students. As a second year teacher, I want to make sure this product is quality for other teachers to be able to use. After I am satisfied I enter the deliver phase where I deliver it to students and staff to use.
At each point in these phases, I will assemble information, synthesize it into something useable and check my information- whether with other teachers or students.