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Imagine visiting a family in a foreign country where you don't know the language. You realize quickly that your own language and culture will not be very effective as you try to communicate with your hosts. Their speech is indecipherable to you, and vice versa. So you undertake a little research--you begin watching and listening to understand how they communicate. You notice their gestures and you learn their language. You want to communicate at appropriate times, so you try to pick up their living patterns--what time they get up, eat meals, work, go home, rest, take vacations.For the most part, this sort of observational research is the only way you as an individual will ever be able to communicate effectively with people of a different culture and language. Attempting to make them learn your language and culture is out of the question. There are many more of them than there is of you, and, frankly, they don't need or want to learn your language and culture--they're perfectly content with their own, thank you very much!
Designing instruction is, in some ways, very much like learning to communicate with people of cultures other than our own. One of the delightful perks of educational technology is that you frequently work with people different than you. They have different goals and different knowledge. They often speak a different language, be it Spanish, English, Chinese, "computerese," "legalese," or some other technical, professional or colloquial language. You want them to learn some specific content, but you can't expect them to learn on your terms. You must bring the instruction to them on their own ground. Understanding that ground is audience analysis, and the topic of Module 6.
Module 06: Connect
In this module:
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Think of audience analysis as providing a window for your audience to allow them to access your instruction (Figure 6.1). You have to put the bottom sill or threshold of the window at the right height so they can see above it. You have to set the top or header appropriately so you won't go "way over their heads." And you have to make them want to open the shutters so they can see and understand. Let's look at what each of these mean in terms of audience analysis, and how to determine where to set each element of the instructional window. |
Figure 6.1. The three elements of your audience's "instructional window." |
Setting the threshold
A useful window has a bottom sill or threshold at just the right height to permit a clear view. The same is true for instruction. In instructional terms, the threshold consists of two factors: (1) prerequisite skills and knowledge; and (2) prior skills and knowledge.
Prerequisite skills and knowledge
Determining prerequisite skills and knowledge just means, "What must they already be able to do or understand before they can learn the new skills and knowledge?" and, "Have these learners mastered these prerequisites?"
For example, if you are teaching young learners to read sentences (using the phonics approach, at any rate), they must already know how to recognize letters and their sounds. Soldiers learning how to set up field communications must already understand the chain of command. Doctors learning to prescribe drug therapy must already understand chemical reactions. Supervisors learning to schedule personnel must already understand the production process.
There are two steps involved in determining prerequisite skills and knowledge. First, you need to find out what the prerequisites are, by talking with subject matter experts or looking at the literature. Second, you need to find out where the learners are "at" in relation to the prerequisites, by talking with them, testing them, or consulting their supervisors or teachers.
Prior skills and knowledge
At first blush, prior skills and knowledge may seem to be the same thing as prerequisite skills and knowledge and, of course, they are related. But there's a difference. Prerequisite skills and knowledge refers to what learners must be able to do and understand before the new information will make sense to them. Prior skills and knowledge refers to useful skills and knowledge on which learners can build new understanding.
For example, if a group of engineers are trying to learn how to build a new type of bridge, both prerequisite and prior skills and knowledge are involved. Prerequisite knowledge might include understanding forces such as tension, compression, and load, and knowledge of structural elements such as posts, beams, and cantilevers. They must understand these concepts in order to comprehend the structure of the new bridge.
Prior knowledge, however, might come in handy in this situation, particularly if these are experienced bridge builders. For instance, the new bridge may be a variant or a combination of other familiar types of bridges, say, a truss bridge and a cantilever bridge. You don't have to know about those bridges to understand the new bridge, but it could save lots of time if you can use those bridges as a starting point, or perhaps as an analogy for the new structure.
Establishing the threshold, by assessing prerequisite and prior skills and knowledge, helps you determine the "base line" for your instruction. It answers the question, "From where are the learners starting?" with respect to this content.
Nailing the Header
Another important question to ask about learners is "How do they learn best?" This is a question about learning skills and preferences rather than content skills and knowledge. It establishes the "upper limit" or range in the sense that it describes constraints due to (1) learners general educational level, and (2) experiences with and preferences for specific learning activities and environments.
Educational Level
Suppose you've determined that your learners--managers in fast food franchises--have the prerequisite knowledge to learn inventory control. You even have a handle on some prior knowledge they have about cash flow on which you can help them build their new understanding of inventory control. You can target the instruction nicely in terms of content, but if you package the content using, say, graduate school level English, the whole thing may go "over their heads." It's important to determine the educational level of your learners so that you can tailor the instruction to their needs.
One way to look at educational level is to consider basic verbal, mathematical, and abstract reasoning or problem solving skills. Some of these may be more important than others, depending on the goals you've established for instruction. Reading level is almost always an important constraint. There are tests for determining individual reading level. There are also formulas (and computer programs that apply those formulas) for determining the reading level of a particular writing sample. By using these tools, you can match the writing level of your instruction to the reading level of your learners.
Verbal, mathematical, and problem solving abilities are the most obvious elements of educational level, but there may be other important abilities, depending on the learners and the content involved. In some cases, it may be important to determine learners' aptitudes for specific psychomotor or cognitive tasks. For instance, if you're training intelligence experts to identify types of submarines, you may want to know their aptitude for, say, pattern recognition, to know how much practice to provide.
After determining learners' educational abilities and aptitudes, you can craft the instruction at an appropriate level.
Learning Preferences
In addition to educational level, we all seem to have our own preferred style of learning, depending on our stage of cognitive development, our past experiences with learning, and perhaps our individual temperament or "learning style."
You will recall that Piaget and others identified several stages of cognitive development through which humans progress as we grow. It is important to understand which stage characterizes our target learners. For example, when we are teaching young children how to count, we give them mathematics "manipulatives"--colored beans, blocks, and so on--so they can count with their hands as well as their heads. They are at a stage of cognitive development in which they learn best through activity and direct experience, and from each other through social interaction. They learn almost exclusively by doing. An activity requiring them to reflect on the relationships among abstract numbers is certain to go down in flames.
Adult accountants, by contrast, no longer rely on manipulating objects. While they also learn by doing, they are capable of "formal operational" thought. You can ask them to predict what would happen if they increased overhead costs by 1% without risking their taking out colored beans and counting them. They can think abstractly, form hypotheses, consider "what if" situations, and solve problems systematically.
So one way of classifying your audience is whether they are children or adults. Indeed, there is a school of educational technologists who have identified differences in learning strategies for children and adults, called pedagogy and and rogogy, respectively. We'll take a closer look at that in Module 11.
Another consideration with respect to learning preferences involves our past experiences with instruction. When I was in elementary and secondary school, the teaching strategies in vogue at the time involved mainly whole class, individual, and, occasionally, small group activities, but rarely anything that today we would describe as "cooperative." In my undergraduate years, the primary methods involved reading and listening to lectures. The really progressive instructors threw in some discussion.
Consequently, those were the learning strategies with which I felt comfortable. I knew how to succeed and "win" under those rules. I took notes in the lectures, studied the readings, took the exams, wrote the papers, and generally gave the instructors what they wanted.
Many students come to our Educational Technology program with much the same past experience, and, consequently, expectations about learning. When we begin to experiment with other learning strategies, such as cooperative learning, project and problem based learning, and individualized instruction, we have to go slowly at first--we have to help everyone get used to the new methods and expectations.
Find out how your learners are used to learning. Do they typically do self study, or do they take part in workshops? Do they rely on individual coaching or scheduled courses? Do they learn on the job or in a classroom? Do they read manuals or need a person to talk with? Do they work (and learn) alone or in teams?
If you think you can improve learning and performance by introducing a new method, be aware that you may encounter every reaction from uncertainty to hostile resistance. At the very least, you must be prepared to train learners in the new strategies themselves, in addition to the content of your course. This will take time and resources, like any other instruction. You have to decide if you can afford the overhead.
Finally, with respect to learning preferences, it is worth mentioning Howard Gardner's (1983) work on "multiple intelligences." Gardner points out that in addition to commonly recognized verbal and mathematical-spatial intelligence, we all have other intelligences as well, like musical and bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. Everyone has a different mix of these intelligences. You may know people, or even be a person, for instance, who can hear and easily remember not only the melody of a song but also the harmony and many other characteristics. You may be a "visual learner" or think of yourself as being "not very good with my hands." You're expressing your own sense of your mix of "multiple intelligences."
For school teachers, it is enough to be aware of the existence of multiple intelligences. It is not important to assess each of your pupil's learning styles. You can take for granted that all your classes are heterogeneous with respect to learning styles. That is, in every class, your children represent all the various intelligences. You can plan all your instruction to take advantage of varying learning styles. For example, you can always plan some kind of musical or bodily-kinesthetic activity in addition to, say, verbal activities.
For adult learners, especially in technical training situations where the learners may share common experiences and even aptitudes, you may obtain some leverage by understanding the group's preferred learning styles. An obvious example would be teaching an orchestra a new piece of music. You can probably count on a high degree of musical intelligence. Verbal instruction may be less important than musical demonstrations. Conductors often sing a passage rather than, or in addition to, describing in words how they want the musicians to play it.
Find out whether your learners, as a group, rely on one or more of their multiple intelligences more heavily than they do on others, so that you can design your instruction accordingly.
By determining your learners' educational level and learning preferences, you have set some upper boundaries on important design decisions such as reading level of the text or the level of detail of diagrams. In addition you have obtained a better sense of what type of instruction to use and how best to deliver it to your learners. You have "nailed the header" for your instruction.
Opening the shutter
You know where learners are starting from, in terms of content, and you know the upper limits of their learning skills, but that is not enough to bring them "through the window" to engage your instruction. They have to want to open the shutters. We don't learn what we don't want to learn.
You will remember that motivation surfaced earlier in the ADDIE process, during performance analysis, in terms of performance motivation. People won't perform a task unless they value the outcome, and unless they are confident they can achieve results. Learning is a performance, too. And people won't learn unless they are motivated to do so. One of our jobs in audience analysis is to find out what motivates our learners to learn. We'll call this instructional motivation to distinguish it from performance motivation, though they share many characteristics.
Instructional Motivation
Probably the most widely accepted approach to instructional motivation is Keller's (1987) ARCS model. ARCS is an acronym that represents four motivational factors: getting learners' attention, keeping instruction relevant, giving learners confidence that they can learn the new skills, and maintaining interest by providing learners satisfaction.
During the audience analysis phase of ADDIE you have an opportunity to find out what motivates your learners by exploring each of these four factors. You can find out what gets their attention. The promise of a reward? The lure of mystery? The appeal of a familiar personality or cause?
Ask what elements can you design into your instruction that will make it relevant to these learners. What situations do they face on a regular basis that could serve as examples? In what ways do the new skills and knowledge relate to tasks they do every day? What bearing do the new skills and knowledge have towards learners' values?
You can try to determine how to help these learners maintain confidence in their ability to learn the skills and knowledge. Do they need frequent reinforcement, or can they go for long stretches without reassurance? Will little signposts keep them feeling they're headed in the right direction or do you need major landmarks along the way.
Finally, you can find out what these learners need to provide satisfaction along the way. Do they need big successes or will a series of small accomplishments do? What satisfies them? More understanding? More skill? More relationships? More recognition?
We'll explore the ARCS model in greater depth in Module 10, when we look at specific strategies for fostering motivation. For the purposes of audience analysis, we want to find out what will entice learners to open the shutters to our instruction and keep them open long enough to learn new skills and knowledge.
Sources of information
As with performance analysis, there are a number of sources for information about the audience. First, of course, there are the learners themselves. If you are in a corporate or military training situation or a school classroom where you deal with a relatively stable population of learners, you may want to conduct an initial audience analysis and then update it periodically as the group evolves. In courseware development companies, on the other hand, you may be dealing with new audiences with every project.
Another source of audience information is existing records. Companies, schools, and government organizations usually have some kind of data on their employees or students. Teachers ordinarily have access to students' school records (though in these days of high mobility, a transfer student's file may not catch up with her or him in a timely fashion). Human resources people have access to employee files. There may be other data available as well. Aggregate data about a group of learners may exist, such as previous test scores, performance reports, and so forth.
You might also want to talk with teachers, supervisors, or superior officers. If they work directly with students, employees, or subordinates, they may be able to help you sketch the window of instructional opportunity for that group of people.
Subject matter experts, both internal and external to the organization, can help you understand what prerequisite knowledge is required.
As with performance analysis, try to get at the characteristics of the learners from two or three viewpoints. Don't rely on a single measure. Find out as much as you can about them from a variety of perspectives.
Tools
The same tools you used for performance analysis are available to you for audience analysis. Again, multiple approaches are most successful. Talk with a few members of the audience, survey the rest, contact some subject matter experts. look over existing records, interview one or two supervisors.