Chapter 4: Foundations of Instructional Design: What's Worth Talking About and What Is Not

The field of instructional design (ID) is in the middle of a significant paradigm debate. On one side, there are proponents of established ID models based on behavioral and cognitive science theories of learning (Braden 1996; Dick, 1995, 1996; Merrill, 1996). These ID models have dominated the field for over 25 years and they have been taught to thousands of graduate students in educational technology programs. Many graduate students, in fact, learned only one ID model while they were in graduate school, and the vast majority of them were taught one of the traditional models. The general framework of the ID models in widespread use today was developed during the sixties and seventies when behavioral psychology still dominated not only educational technology but education in general. The ID models matured and evolved in the eighties and nineties, and, while their behavioral roots are still quite obvious, the influence of a number of other theories, such as information processing theory, general systems theory, cognitive science, and communications theory, is apparent in the current generation of ID models (Dick, 1996).