week 8: instructional strategies for principals learning

Principles are high-ordered rules knowledge.
This is so because principles prescribe the relationships among two or more concepts.
The concepts are often in the form of variables (factors that has many values)
These conceptual relationships is described in two forms:
1. if-then
2. cause-effect

In layman terms, principles are the "knowing why".
Because not only principles enables learners to explain what has happened,
it also allows you to predict what will happen,
and most importantly, it allow the control of the effects of variables.

To truly acquire a principle,
means not only to be able to state the principle (declarative knowledge)
but ALSO to apply the principle to various unencountered situations.

Principle learning is the basis to domain-specific problems - they are the core of processing needed in problem solving: learners have to be equipped principles to explain the conceptual reltationships (meaning that certain principles are combined to solve certain problems.)

Principles learning is different from learning procedures,
but procedures are often used as alternatives to principles.

Procedures, as mentioned in the previous post, are a generalised series of steps in response to a particular class of circumstances to reach a specific goal.

However,
there are differences between principle-learning and procedure learning.
The differences include cognitive processes (the informational processing analysis for principles is different from that for procedures).

During the lecture,
Alfred taught us that the two toughest instructional events for teaching principles are feedback and practice.

However, i think that these two can go hand-in-hand.
Because by practising,
instructors can gather feedback about the learners' progress and address the learners' misconceptions.

There are many ways for handling feedbacks with e-learning:
1. analysis and interpretation by system (adaptive feedback)
2. by referring to "model" answer
3. self-reflection and self-checking
4. by referring to external feedback system (eg. e-tutor)