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Generic Definition of Teaching as Instruction: a. Managing the learning of others. b. Behavioral processes used to change behavior patterns of learners. c. Sequences of descriptions and discussions intended to increase the rate of adoption, adaptation, maintenance, and extension of a behavior pattern by learners. d. An effort to support learners’ survival. Generic Definition of Efficiency of Instruction: a. The relative rate that instruction changes behavior patterns to those used by the most informed people in a society. b. Lessons requiring fewer trials-and-errors and fewer learner’s resources such as time, effort, and energy to reach a learning criterion. c. The power, skill of instruction to reduce waste and other risks of failure a learner encounters in a lesson. Generic Definition of Efficiency of Instruction Analysis: a. Examining the management of learning. b. Analyzing behavior patterns of learning during a lesson and comparing them against each other and against external criteria in order to calculate the relative waste and risks of failure of learners to meet criterion. c. A way to assess costs in time, effort, and tangibles a learner pays for completing a lesson. d. A way to assess the adequacy of instruction and instructional material to yield expected results. Generic Definition of The Instruction Cube (TIC): A Paradigm to Analyze the Efficiency of Instruction (PAEI) a. A behavioral infrastructure of instruction as described by empirical experimental behavioral science research results. b. A framework of behavioral science descriptions and relationships among behavior patterns people use to instruct. c. A framework of behavior patterns instructors use, so others can assess the extent to which lessons promptly increase learning dramatically. |
The Instruction Cube (TIC): A Paradigm to Analyze the Efficiency of Instruction (PAEI) permits observers to monitor and forecast the risk of failure that a lesson offers learners. Behavioral scientists have described these points over more than a century. This Beta version of TIC is based on observations of choices that 1,000 pre- and in-service public school teachers made to offer lessons. Most of them choose uniquely personal hybrids of available instruction options.
Teachers make these choices to instruct (a process) a lesson (a process plus content) in order for a learner to meet a lesson-defined outcome (a result, what’s learned). These choices provide a range of instruction ranging from learner-initiated trial-and-error behavior patterns to prescripted direct instruction. Taken together, these choices yield learning results that form a classic Bell Curve.
TIC illustrates eight generic choice points that instructors use and that observers can monitor. These choices exist in three dimensions and result in giving priority to selected options over others for instructing.
Dimension 1 – The Lesson: Gives priority to the process of instruction or the content of the lesson,
Dimension 2 – Focus of the Lesson: Gives priority to discussions about or descriptions of the content; and
Dimension 3 – Results of the Lesson: Gives priority to reduced risks of the lesson failing to increasing measured learning or to other outcomes.
TIC serves as an implicit reminder that learners have only n seconds of instruction; learning from instruction is time-bound by that n.
The most efficient teachers select ways to instruct that reduce the number of trials-and-errors of learners to meet the learning criterion of each lesson. These ways are consistent with descriptions of behavior patterns people use to learn.
TIC permits observers to monitor instructors’ choices during lessons.
TIC also guides the refinement of lessons by teachers planning to increase learners’ efficiency promptly and directly.