Instructional Theory and Design Theory

The work of Simon (Sciences of the Artificial, 1999, 3rd ed., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), Schon (Educating the Reflective Practitioner, 1987, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass) and others (for instance, Newsome, S., Spillers, W. & Finger, S. (1989). Design Theory '88, New York: Springer-Verlag.) point to important differences between domain theories and design theories. To clarify this distinction, I worked with Clint Rogers to write about "The Architecture of Instructional Theory" (in press). Our conversations detected an apparent relationship between instructional theories (domain theories expressed by individual theorists) and instructional design theories (a framework of instructional design structure we created by applying layer theory to instructional designs). We have written a condensed version of this idea with Su-Ling Hsueh in "The Generative Aspect of Design Theory" (Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, July 2005). The result is a system of reference that makes it possible to analyze and compare the many instructional theories in terms of their commonalities, range of coverage, and domain-specificity.

Contact me at:   andy_gibbons@byu.edu