Summary of Four Architectures of Instruction

Four Architectures of Instruction
Ruth Colvin Clark

According to the author of this article, their are four basic strategies to learning thus also to instruction. She identifies that of all of the strategies, not one is best for all learners. Approaches or architectures should be based in the the audience's background, cognitive abilities, motivation for training and end product.

Receptive Architecture
Receptive instruction assumes that learners can absorb knowledge and skills when they are exposed to them such as when listening to a lecture,watching a video, or reading text. This is a very instructor-controlled environment. Clark notes that receptive training varies a great deal in its use of specific instructional methods such as examples, analogies, visuals, and sequencing of information. Challenges of the model is that it may lead to cognitive or information overload as well as long-term memory encoding failure. Which simply means that it may just be too much information to retain and save to be useful in practice. This method is found to best used in situations of briefing. A researched team in the article found that four main factors that predicted successful learning from reading text were:

1. metacognitive ability to recognize learning deficiencies,

2. working memory capacity,

3. inferencing ability (e.g. the ability to extend and connect information in a reading beyond the context of the reading itself), and

4. prior knowledge in the specific subject domain of the reading.

Behavioral Architectures

Behavioral instruction assumes that learning occurs by a gradual bottom up building and association of skills, which are strengthened by correct learner responses to carefully constructed and tested interactions. Thus the role of the learner is to respond correctly to frequent interactions embedded into the instruction. Behavioral architectures tend to emphasize:

1. bottom up hierarchies in which prerequisite knowledge and skills are sequenced before more
complex knowledge and skills

2. chunking of instruction into relatively short lessons that build on each other

3. frequent interactions to build the skill hierarchies in the learner

4. effective feedback to provide knowledge of results and promote subsequent adjustments by the learner

This was a easier concept for me, being a pre-K teacher, this is method that I use daily. I also belief that is the way that I learn. A cognitive impact of the architectures is most positive encoding into the long-term memory through repetition. Clark states that while this will be helpful for novice (new) learners, individuals with more experience find the approach to
be “overkill” with their motivation and subsequent learning may be depressed.

Situated Guided Discovery Architectures
In laymen terms can be described as small group work. In this architecture, the instructor is used as a point of resources, reflection and enlightenment on the topic area. This is a much more student guided approach than the earlier mention architectures.

Cognitive Impact
Guided Discovery architectures may challenge cognitive load and will demand good metacognitive skills by learners. Because they are case based, by design they should promote encoding into and transfer from long-term memory of job-relevant skills. In combination with high levels of learner control this technique may cause an overload working memory to new learners. If the audience background is different in the degree of knowledge then opportunities to access a more behavioral instructional approach should be included into the instruction.

Exploratory Architectures
This design is setup with the highest level learner control. Internet classes or instruction is an example of an exploratory architectures which is an inherently learner controlled environment. Clark states that depending on the design and structure of the topics in an exploratory architecture, overload can result. Keeping
topics brief and adding frequent optional practice exercise provides an opportunity for load control.
Thus exploratory architectures may be risky for learners who lack background in the material being taught and who lack effective self-regulatory skills.

In other words, all architectures should be provided based on the performance outcomes and learning audience.