Lesson 4 - Instructional Analysis, pt. 2

In the last lesson we discussed the first step in the instructional analysis process, which involved classifying the goal statement according to the type of learning that will occur and then identifying and sequencing the major steps required to perform the goal. In this lesson we look at the next step in the instructional analysis process, which involves identifying the Subordinate Skills and Entry Behaviors that provide for a more complete analysis of the instructional goal. Doing this allows you to decide which skills you are going to teach and which ones learners will have to already possess before they are exposed to the instruction. We will also examine different methods to use when creating flowcharts or diagrams that illustrate this process.

The subordinate skills analysis involves analyzing each of your goal steps and substeps to determine what prerequisite skills or knowledge are required to be able to adequately perform that step. These skills and knowledge are referred to as Subordinate Skills. This is different from what you did last Lesson, in which you determined the main steps necessary to achieve your goal. In other words, the steps and substeps are the activities that an expert or skilled person would describe as the steps in achieving the goal. The subordinate skills are not steps or substeps on the way to the goal; they are the supporting information that learners need to be able to perform those steps (see below). They would not necessarily be described by an expert when describing the process.

For example, in order to create a document in Word you would need to open the program, type some text, cut and paste, save the document, etc. In order to do all of that you would need to first be able to operate a keyboard and mouse. Knowing how to operate a keyboard and mouse are not really substeps in creating a Word document, they are more subordinate skills that are required in order to perform the steps of opening the program, typing text, highlighting text, etc.

Why is it important to identify these subordinate skills if they are not part of the main steps towards achieving the goal? Well, before performing an activity (step), the learners must (1) know how to perform the activity, and (2) possess the skills to perform the activity. The learners are likely to possess some of the necessary knowledge and/or skills, but will need instruction to acquire the remaining knowledge and skills. Without a complete inventory of relevant knowledge and skills, important instructional components could be overlooked and omitted.

There are several different approaches one can take when performing a subordinate skills analysis. The decision to use a particular procedure usually rests on the type of goal being addressed. For intellectual or psychomotor goals you will likely use a hierarchical analysis. For verbal goals a cluster analysis is recommended. Finally, for attitudinal goals a combination of approaches is used. We'll summarize the various approaches to the subordinate skills analysis in the following paragraphs.

The hierarchical approach, as pictured in figures 4.1 - 4.4 in the book, is used to analyze the individual steps in the analysis of goals involving intellectual or psychomotor skills. At this point you want to focus on one goal step at a time, starting with the first one. Look at each goal step and think about what skills and knowledge a learner must possess to be able to perform that step. Gagné suggests beginning with the question, "What must the student already know so that, with a minimum amount of instruction, this task can be learned?" The answer will likely be one or more subordinate skills. These subordinate skills are what the learners will need to know to be able to perform that step. It may be best at first to write them down in bulleted or outline form, much like you did when you were first identifying your original goal steps.

After you have identified the initial subordinate skills for a step, you should then examine each of those subordinate skills and determine if there are any additional skills or knowledge that the learners must possess in order to learn those skills. This will result in the identification of additional subordinate skills. This process should continue until you reach the very basic level of performance, such as "identifying nouns and verbs". This does not mean that you will have to teach these skills to the learners. Eventually you will determine which of these skills should be classified as Entry Behaviors and not be taught. But for right now, you should include all the relevant subordinate skills. After you have finished analyzing your first goal step, continue on this way, analyzing each succeeding goal step to identify subordinate skills, and then analyzing those subordinate skills to identify more subordinate skills. In this way you will be building a hierarchy of skills that are required to attain each main goal step.

If you remember Gagné's five categories of learning from the last lesson, intellectual skills are skills that require the learner to perform some unique cognitive activity. Gagné divides Intellectual Skills into the following subcategories, depending on the complexity of the mental processing involved. Here's a listing of those categories once again:

This categorization of intellectual skills is a hierarchy, which means that each higher-level skill requires the lower skills as a prerequisite. Because of this, if you are trying to analyze a higher-order skill, the subordinate skills will likely be lower-order intellectual skills. After all, if you look at what higher-order rules are, you see that they are combinations of simpler rules. Since rules are made up of concepts and discriminations, your subordinate skills for a problem-solving activity could fall into any of these sub-categories.

In the process of determining your subordinate skills you may discover that some of the knowledge required to learn a particular goal step is not an intellectual skill but instead simply verbal information. In fact, with any goal you are likely to have subordinate skills that represent several of Gagné's domains of learning, even if your original goal falls only into one domain. If it is relevant to achieving a particular goal step then you should include it in your analysis.

When you think you have identified all of the relevant subordinate skills (subskills) for each goal step, you will want to add these to your instructional analysis diagram. Each subordinate skill should be represented by its own box, and should be connected to the goal step it supports. In addition, it should state the skill that the learner must be able to do at that step. Also, notice that the arrows on the lines connecting each subordinate skill box to the steps and skills above it points up from the subordinate skill towards the higher skills. In a hierarchical analysis, it is traditional to place superordinate skills above the skills upon which they are dependant in order for the reader to automatically recognize the implied learning relationship of the subskills. This means that the lower-order skills will end up at the bottom. When working with these skills, it may be useful to work your way up from the bottom, starting with very basic or foundational skills and then working your way up to the skills most closely connected to the goal step they support.

If your intellectual or psychomotor goal has subordinate skills that involve verbal information, you can still include it in your hierarchical flowchart, even though that verbal information is not part of the intellectual hierarchy. It is suggested that these skills be connected to the main hierarchical analysis using a connector like this:

If your goal falls in the domain of verbal information there will probably not be any specific sequence inherent in the information. In other words, it may not involve going from one step to the next. With verbal information you are not identifying a sequence of steps, but mainly you are just identifying the information that is needed to achieve your goal. In this case a cluster analysis is generally used. This involves identifying and grouping major categories of information that are implied by the goal, and then deciding how the information can be clustered together best.

Diagramming a cluster analysis can be achieved by using the hierarchical technique with the goal at the top and each major cluster as a subskill. Because your information is in clusters, and there is no explicit sequence, it is not considered a hierarchy.

As you learned in the last lesson, attitudinal goals also require a slightly different approach. It generally involves asking the following two questions:

First you should identify the behavior that you will look for to determine if the attitude is being demonstrated. What would people be doing if they were demonstrating that they were following the desired attitude? This will most likely be an intellectual skill or a motor skill. From there you should determine the goal steps and the accompanying subordinate skills just like you do for any other intellectual or psychomotor goal. You will then end up with a hierarchical analysis of skills that represent what learners will be doing if they choose to exhibit the desired attitude.

The second part involves explaining to a learner "why" they should make the choice to exhibit that attitude. The answer to this usually involves verbal information. For an attitudinal goal, it's not enough that you teach a learner how to do it; they have to choose to do it, and this is the information that will assist them in making that choice. The verbal information can be arranged in its own separate cluster analysis, or integrated into the overall hierarchical analysis.

On an instructional analysis flowchart, attitudinal goals are represented by attaching the attitudinal box to the intellectual or psychomotor skill that learners will choose to demonstrate. This is done using an "A" connector. From there you then list the necessary steps and skills necessary to achieve the desired skill. For the supporting verbal information (the "why"), you can either provide a separate cluster analysis, or integrate it into the hierarchical analysis by attaching each verbal "skill" in a box beside the psychomotor or intellectual skill that it supports. This is done using the triangular "V" connectors described earlier.

At the bottom of page 67, Dick and Carey give an example of what a diagram of an attitudinal goal might look like.

The techniques described in the preceding sections should allow you to ascertain and arrange the subordinate skills for each category of goal. In the end, it is important to review your analysis several times to make sure you have properly identified all of the subordinate skills required for students to master your main instructional goal. Also, be on the lookout for skills that could be classified as "nice to know", but are not necessarily required for learners to learn the goal. It may be best to leave them out of the analysis.

The final step in the instructional analysis process is determining entry behaviors. These are the skills and knowledge that the learners must know or be able to do before they begin the instruction. If you followed through with your subordinate skills analysis, the bottom of your hierarchy should contain very basic skills. If all of your goal steps are analyzed in this manner then you will have a complete list of all the skills required for a learner to reach your instructional goal. It is likely, though, that the learners already have many of these skills, so they will therefore not need to be included in the instruction you develop. These are the skills that you will assume that the learners have before they begin the new instruction.

Entry behaviors can be identified in your diagram by examining your instructional analysis flowchart and identifying the skills that most learners will have already mastered. Once you have done this, draw a dotted line above the skills you identify as entry behaviors. What appears above that line is a listing of the skills and knowledge you will include in your instruction. Below that are the skills that learners should have previously learned; they will not be included in the instruction. The combination of both of these is all the skills they must have to perform the task that is essential for reaching the final goal.

Determining entry behaviors requires some assumption on the part of the designer. However, it is critical to the instructional analysis process as it helps the designer identify exactly what learners will already have to know or be able to do before they begin instruction. It also identifies what you, as the designer, will include in your instruction. If you "draw the line" too low then you will be teaching things that learners already know, thus wasting lots of development time and millions of dollars in costs (well, maybe not that much). Not to mention, your learners might be bored stiff. On the other hand, if you draw the line too high then your learners will not have the necessary prerequisite skills to be able to achieve your goal, and may just sit there with that "zoned-out" look. In this case your instructional materials would be ineffective. What all this means is that you should put some thought into who your learners are and what they might already know. If you are a teacher you may already be familiar with your learners. However, in other situations it may not be so easy, and you may want to seek out some more information before "drawing the line". If you have absolutely no knowledge of your intended learners at this point, then you might want to wait until after you complete the next step in the Dick and Carey model, which is when you analyze the learners.

The Dick and Carey book provides a lot of examples of instructional analysis diagrams. However, you may have noticed that the goal steps and subordinate skills in their examples seem to be numbered in an arbitrary fashion. It almost appears as though they change numbering systems with every example. However, at the top of page 89 they redeem themselves by showing an example of a typical hierarchical analysis that demonstrates the generally accepted numbering conventions. While there is no set way of numbering goal steps, substeps, and subordinate skills, in general the way this diagram is numbered is the way we would recommend you attempt to number your flowcharts.

Unfortunately, as great as this diagram is, they have a few minor errors in it with regards to their connecting lines. Because of that, and because we think that it would be very helpful, we have created a corrected version, which you see below. In addition, we created a PDF version of it so that you can download it for easy reference when creating your own flowcharts.

Notice how the goal steps and substeps are numbered sequentially from left to right, while the subordinate skills are numbered from the bottom up. To summarize:

At the end of the subordinate skills analysis, you should have a listing of all the subordinate skills required to perform each of your main goal steps. As you can see above, your completed instructional analysis should then include the instructional goal, a list of the main steps required to accomplish that goal, the subordinate skills required to accomplish each of the main steps, and the entry behaviors. This framework then becomes the foundation for all of the following steps in the instructional design process.

Let's once again revisit our earlier example of teaching students how to use the AltaVista search engine to perform research. In the last lesson we showed you a goal statement and 5 goal steps. Here's a look at the flowchart after adding the subordinate skills to it:

After analyzing all the steps in relation to the main goal, it was decided that the first goal step, which involved locating a computer and obtaining Internet access, would become an entry behavior. Notice the dotted line that separates that step and all its underlying subordinate skills from the rest of the steps. Usually this line is horizontal across the bottom, but in this case it works fine to use it to separate one of the goal steps.

In addition, Appendix C in the Dick and Carey book shows a revised instructional analysis for their goal on story writing. It includes the subordinate skills and entry behaviors for one of the goal steps.

In the last lesson you began Part Two of your ID Project by classifying your goal into one of Gagné's learning domains, and then broke that goal down into relevant steps. In this activity you will complete your instructional analysis by identifying relevant subordinate skills and entry behaviors. To complete Part Two of your ID Project, perform the following tasks:

In order for learners to accomplish a specific step associated with your goal, it may be necessary for them to learn something or develop an ability to do something before receiving instruction on that step. Answer the following questions regarding your goal steps:

When you have answered these questions, revise your instructional analysis flowchart to include these subordinate skills. Try to follow the diagramming and numbering conventions used in the Dick and Carey book (or use the example we provided). You may need to shift things around in order to make room for the extra boxes.

Once you have all of your subordinate skills identified, it's time to determine which of those skills to treat as entry behaviors. Answer the following questions:

When you have answered these questions, add a dotted line to your flowchart indicating where the entry behaviors are. All the skills listed above the line will be included in your instructional materials, and all the skills below the line will be ones learners will have to already possess before they are exposed to the instruction. When you are finished, insert your revised flowchart into your Word document. You should then have two versions of your instructional analysis flowchart included in Part Two of your ID Project, the original version and this completed version.

At the end of this lesson you will submit your completed Part Two. To recap, Part Two of your ID Project should be typed up in Microsoft Word. At the top of the paper you should have "ID Project Part Two: Instructional Analysis". Underneath that should be your name, email address, and the date. Also, make sure the file is named "analysis.doc". When you have completed Part Two, upload the Word document to the "instrdes" folder in your Filebox. When you have finished uploading your file, proceed to the online student interface to officially submit your activities for grading.

Assignment: ID Project Part Two (cont.)
Points: 20

Grading Criteria:

Identify Subordinate Skills

Lists the subordinate skills identified for each goal step and substep. (5)
Describes how the subordinate skills were identified. (2)

Entry Behaviors

Describes whether or not each subordinate skill will be included in the instruction, or if it will become an entry behavior. (3)
Describes how the entry behaviors were determined. (2)
Revised instructional analysis flowchart that includes all subordinate skills and entry behaviors. Includes a dotted line separating the entry behaviors from the subskills. Follows proper diagramming conventions. (8)