SMR v1.0 Personal Review

The following are notes that I wrote down as I was reviewing my own SMR form.

SMR v1.0
Personal Review – Milton Bulian

     There is a disconnect in the SMR. I keep slipping into teaching and learning because I’m still thinking like a practitioner and leaning toward Training and Performance Improvement (T&PI).
     My Title is a good one – “Impact of a Constructivist Approach to Software Training Design.” I’m focused on the design of training for software and asking how a constructivist approach will affect that design.
     My Research Topic shifts a little in that it says I will study the effect that results/is created when constructivist design elements are applied to training for productivity software. This could be approached in three ways: (1) the impact on the process, (2) the impact on the product, and (3) the impact on the learner. The last one again could lead to getting off design issues, but mostly if it is the only focus.
     My Research Problem continues the slide into T&PI. Although I am comparing current design using behavior modeling to my proposed design using constructivist techniques, the focus is on the learner’s proficiency. Not gooder!
     Research Purpose – More with the learner’s proficiency! Reigeluth (1999) says that instructional-design theory identifies methods of instruction and the situations in which those methods should and should not be used. Further, in all instructional-design theories, the methods of instruction can be broken down into more detailed component methods which provide more guidance to educators.
     The Research Question is totally bogus. The focus should be “design,” not “user proficiency.”
     The Literature Review seems less focused on user proficiency and more toward design.
     The Need for the study is again borderline. As long as I am using a descriptive approach to research and not actually testing learners, I should be okay.
     The Methodology again needs to be cleaned up a little with regard to how much of a product will be developed. Rather than willy-nilly applying a whole plethora of constructivist techniques to the whole training system simultaneously to see if the students become more proficient (T&PI), it would be more design-oriented to break the various techniques up and apply them separately to the whole lesson (a mammoth undertaking), different sections of the lesson (still elephantine), different parts of the same section of a lesson (now we’re getting somewhere) or even as different approaches to the same frame of information from a section (now we’re down to bite-sized!). Comparison could be made within the construction process, the appearance of the product, and/or Kirkpatrick Level 1 reviews by potential users of the training or those familiar with the topic.

REFERENCE

     Reigeluth, C. M. (1999). What is instructional-design theory and how is it changing? In C. M. Reigeluth (Ed.) Instructional-design theories and models, vol. II. (pp. 5-29). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.