Learning-Focused Instruction: Tasks

From a learning-focused perspective, instruction consists of two major components, tasks and guidance. While students actively perform instructional tasks the teacher provides instructional guidance in helping them perform the tasks adequately.

Instructional tasks are response-demand activities that function as explicit and observable manifestations of students’ implicit and unobservable cognitive processes. For example, cognitive psychologists [1] studied children’s implicit and unobservable, age-related intellectual development by giving them explicit and observable tasks consisting of sorting differently colored geometric-shaped objects into groups. They were not told how to sort the objects. The same tasks were given to children of different ages, and the ways they sorted the objects were considered indicative of their implicit, age-related intellectual development. The studies found that children of different ages sorted the objects differently. Five-year olds tended to group the objects by color rather than geometric shape, all blue shapes in one group, red in another, and so forth. Eleven-year olds tended to group by geometric shapes rather than color, triangles in one group, rectangles in another, and so forth.

Different types of instructional tasks are required for each of the three categories of instructional practice because each category involves quite different implicit cognitive processes. Recall Knowledge tasks involve the implicit cognitive process of encoding information in long-term memory and then retrieving it in much the same way it was originally presented as sensory input. Application Knowledge tasks involve the implicit cognitive process of recognizing whether the novel objects and actions presented in the task are examples of a generalization by retrieving relevant encoded information from long-term memory and transferring it to the recognition of the novel objects and actions. Procedural Knowledge tasks involve the implicit cognitive process of retrieving from long-term memory and then enacting the action steps that are appropriate for solving the novel problem presented in the task.

Instructional tasks also involve subject matter. For example, here in brief form are instructional tasks for the science knowledge of electromagnetic induction. A task for Recall Knowledge might contain a diagram showing an example of an electromagnetic induction circuit with a number beside each component, and students are asked to write the name of each component beside its number. Another task for Recall Knowledge might contain only a blank page and students are asked to draw a diagram of an electromagnetic induction circuit and to write the name of each component beside it. A task for Application Knowledge might show students a series of diagrams of electric circuits they have not seen before and ask them to identify which are examples and which are non-examples of electromagnetic induction circuits, and ask for a justification of each identification. A task for Procedural Knowledge might consist of a box of electrical objects students have not seen before, and students are asked to construct a working model of electromagnetic induction, and to explain why their model is an example of electromagnetic induction.

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1. Gibson, E.J. and Levin, H. (1975). The psychology of reading. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Markman, E.M. (1981). Two different principles of conceptual organization. In M.E. Lamb & A.L. Brown (Eds), Advances in Developmental Psychology( Vol. 1). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.