Development Risks

• Your students will have insufficient practice to learn because your activities do not align with your test items or there are no practice items.

  Each learning objective must have a performance measure specified and the performance measure must be closely aligned with the test question. The test question must be absolutely parallel to the practice or activities. According to information processing theory, you must rehearse (or store and retrieve) each skill or bit of information several times in order to ensure learning.

  At minimum you must retrieve the prerequisite skills, combine them with the new knowledge to form the basis for the performance of the terminal skill and store that performance knowledge twice, once in an activity and once in a different but parallel test item. This will give most learners a chance to properly store the skill (learn it).

  You must give feedback on correct performance at completion of the activity. If performance is inadequate, the student must be told how to correct it, and given a second attempt to perform the skill.

  I also recommend feedback on test items so the student will know whether they have performed corrrectly.

  You do not have to give corrective advice on test items, but it is not harmful in competency-based learning to tell the students specifically what areas they should study after they have failed a test. You are trying to train each student, not eliminate a certain number or create a normal curve of performance. It is not in your best interest to have 50% of the job performers unable to perform. So use every opportunity to help them learn.

  Therefore, you must have an activity (practice) or you are unlikely to have learning, and that practice (activity) must be parallel to your test item. However, both the test item and the practice activity may only be a close approximation to the performance measure if the performance measure is too difficult to replicate in the classroom.

• Your delivery system will not be robust or sufficient to your needs.

  You must stress-test your delivery system at your maximum predicted load either through simulation or actual system test if you have chosen electronic delivery.

• Your management plan will not be adequate to the scheduling and monitoring of students.

  Bench test the procedures in your student management plan, and simulate the multiplied effects of a normal student load.

• You will waste resources developing materials that already exist.

  Actually, I have never found that there were many useful existing materials, and therefore it was easier to develop what I knew I needed than spend the time looking at existing modules. However, It is possible that you can find large pieces of the planned course, especially fundamental objectives.

• Your instructional materials will not adequately present materials for all objectives or for any single objective.

  You must take a rigorous approach to providing all the supporting facts and demonstrations for each and every objective, no matter it's position in the hierarchy of objectives. There are no special objectives that get more attention than the others. Each one must be taught fully in order to ensure mastery of the terminal learning objective and the job performance.

• You will not discover the inevitable errors in your instruction prior to using the materials with hundreds of students.

  Do not skip the validation step. No instruction is ever perfect even after extensive field trials. Use this opportunity to get as many of the bugs out of the instruction as possible. Only live students can provide you with this information, because you have been constructing a series of events that you expect human minds to absorb. Your series of events can only be tested properly with human minds. Experience and theory can put you on the right track, but only students can tell you if you have prepared your materials adequately.
  

Development: Methodology | Risks | Application Tips