Aligning Instructional Practice

	RECALL KNOWLEDGE	APPLICATION KNOWLEGE	PROCEDURAL KNOWLEDGE
Subject Matter
Lesson Objectives
Assessment
Instruction

Aligning instructional practice with cognitive psychology is accomplished by having subject matter, lesson objectives and assessment categorized in terms of the empirically-based instructional strategies for categories derived from theory and research in cognitive psychology. Abundant research has identified instructional strategies that are very effective for teaching subject matter categorized as Recall Knowledge. It is the same for the categories of Application Knowledge and Procedural Knowledge.

Unfortunately the term instructional alignment has too often been defined narrowly as a fit between lesson objectives and the testing used in assessing student mastery of those objectives [1]. One would assume that a book published in 2001, entitled, Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing [2], would provide explicit specifications for designing and carrying out teaching that is intended to help students learn. It actually provides fairly specific guidelines for assessment and only very broad descriptions of instructional procedures. The authors justify their lack of specificity about instructional procedures by their stated belief that researchers have failed to identify effective, empirically-based instructional strategies in the last four decades, and probably never will. That is a very pessimistic view of the possibilities of using cognitive science to improve the effectiveness of instructional practice. But with the way they designed their taxonomy that might well be true. By contrast, the proposed paradigm is designed to provide explicit specifications for empirically-based instructional strategies by its intentional alignment with cognitive psychology and its theory and immense body of relevant research.

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1 (For example). Cohen, S.A. (1987). Instructional alignment: Searching for the magic bullet. Educational Researcher, 16(8), 16-20.

2. Anderson, L.W., Krathwohl, D.R., Airasian, P.W., Cruikshank, K.A., Mayer, R.M., Pintrich, R.P., Raths, J., & Wittrock, M.C. (2001) A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing. New York: Longman.