Applying Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction

Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence

Applying Merrill's First Principles of Instruction

Education researcher David Merrill articulated his five "first principles of instruction" after reviewing a variety of theories of instructional design. His "first principles" are basic methods that can be readily understood and applied by faculty to enhance their instruction in a wide variety of learning contexts. Concisely, these principles state that learning is promoted when:

1. Learners are engaged in solving real-world problems 2. Learners' existing knowledge is activated as a foundation for new knowledge 3. New knowledge is demonstrated to the learner 4. New knowledge is applied by the learner 5. New knowledge is integrated into the learner's world

1. Solving realworld problems

5. Integration

2. Activation

4. Application

3. Demonstration

If you have observed that a particular a unit, class session, or other portion of a course has not been producing the results you had envisioned in terms of student learning and feedback, it could be that you could make more use of one or more of these principles. For example, Merrill observed that often too much emphasis is placed on demonstration, and other phases in the sequence are neglected. Use the following checklist, based on Merrill's (2002a) elaboration of his first principles of instruction to identify how you can reframe or adjust the presentation of the subject in the next iteration of the course.

References

Mendenhall, A., Buhanan, C. W., Suhaka, M., Mills, G., Gibson, G. V., & Merrill, M. D. (2006). A task centered approach to entrepreneurship. TechTrends, 50(4), 84-89.

Merrill, M. D. (2002a). First principles of instruction. Educational Technology Research and Development, 50(3), 43-59.

Merrill, M. D. (2002b). A pebble-in-the-pond model for instructional design. Performance Improvement, 41(7), 41-46.

Merrill, M. D. (2007). A task-centered instructional strategy. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 40(1), 5?22.

Laura Lohman, Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence, Queens University of Charlotte

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In the second column, estimate the relative amount of instructional time you have spent on each principle in the past in the unit or class session you have in mind (e.g., "most," "least" "none," "some", "a little").

First Principles

1. Learners engaged in solving realworld problems

Relative amount of instructional time

Corollaries

Check any that you regularly used in this unit or class session in the past.

Show a problem or demonstrate a whole task first, possibly before stating learning objectives in words

Next steps

Star 3 new corollaries you can implement.

2. Learners' existing knowledge is activated as a foundation for new knowledge

Learners:

Have relevant experience

Are prompted to recall, describe, apply, demonstrate what they already know

Are prompted to recall a relevant structure or mental schema to organize new knowledge

3. New knowledge is demonstrated to the learner

4. New knowledge is applied by the learner

In a way consistent with learning goal:

Examples/nonexamples for concepts Demos for procedures Visualizations for processes Modeling for behaviors

Direct learners to relevant info

Give them multiple demonstrations

Explicitly compare the demonstrations

Practice is consistent with problem

Practice regarding info, parts of X, kinds of X, how to do X, what happens after X

Feedback and coaching

Feedback/coaching gradually withdrawn

Show how to detect error, recover, avoid

Solve a sequence of varied problems

5. New knowledge is integrated into the learner's world

Can repeat the cycle

"New knowledge is integrated into the learner's world"

Learners publicly demonstrate new skill

Learners reflect on, discuss, and defend their new skill/knowledge

Create personal ways to use it

Engage them in a progression of problems of greater complexity

Compare problems to each other

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