Tools and Settings
Content
Questions and Tasks
Once you have articulated your instructional goal, the next step in the process is to break down that goal into the steps required to complete the goal. Dick & Carey call this a "goal analysis"; however, I find it works better as the first step in the task analysis. Task analysis is a great tool to use when analyzing a complex training requirement. It is also a great tool to use with Subject Matter Experts to get them to articulate what they do so that you can design instruction around it.
There are different ways to do a task analysis, but the general idea is to take the instructional goal and figure out what is needed in order to accomplish the goal, first by looking at what steps are involved in accomplishing the goal, and then looking at what knowledge and skills are necessary to perform the steps. The process itself is iterative. We start with a high level list of steps and then break down those steps into substeps, and continue until we reach a level that the Learner is expected to already know. This is why it is important to do a learner analysis.
It is easy for this activity to become pedantic. You need just enough information to build training. You don't need to go into excessive detail.
We start this by asking the question:
What do experts do to accomplish the goal successfully?
When answering this question, you general get a high level list of steps or procedures. The focus of this level is on doing not thinking. We will get to thinking in a later level. Once you have figured out what your high level tasks are, you continue asking the question with each task. You want to go only as deep as you need to.
At this point in the process, we are still focusing on the performance context, not the learning context. Later, we will look at what we want to teach. For now, we want to stay focused on what the successful person does.
In addition we want to focus on expressing our analysis using language that is observable. This focus on observable will become really important when we start talking about assessment and how we validate that learners have achieved the instructional goal.
Avoid trying to articulate what the expert is thinking, rather, focus on what the expert is doing.
Goal analysis is often shown as a linear process, goals do not necessarily need to break down into an ordered linear fashion. We use the linear model as a way to abstract the goal and break it into component parts, but it doesn’t necessarily show the order in which those parts need to take place.
Goal: Instructional Designers need to write observable instructional goals in their home office with pencil and paper
Goal Analysis:
Goal: Instructional designers need to be able to effectively evaluate new technologies using a minimal amount of time.
Goal: Beginning college students need to know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with bread, peanut butter, and jam.
When doing your goal analysis, you broken your goal down into tasks. You answered the question “what does the expert do in order to achieve the goal?”
The next step in the process is to break down each of the tasks asking the questions:
Don’t get caught up in the names of the processes – that is, what some people call task analysis others call subordinate skills analysis. Some people call goal analysis, others call it all task analysis. What is important to remember is that we first ask “what does the expert do?” and then we ask “what does the learner need to know or know how to do?”
Task Analysis: