Instructional Design and Curriculum Frameworks

Instructional Design and Curriculum Frameworks groups models and taxonomies for structuring what is taught and how a lesson or curriculum is sequenced, distinct from a psychological theory of how learning itself happens inside the learner. Belongs here: Bloom's Taxonomy and SOLO Taxonomy, hierarchical classifications of learning objectives and outcome complexity used to design instruction and assessment; Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe's backward-design framework starting from desired outcomes; Spiral Curriculum, Jerome Bruner's principle of revisiting topics with increasing complexity over time; Anchored Instruction, a multimedia problem-based curriculum design from the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt; Cone of Experience, Edgar Dale's model ordering instructional media from concrete to abstract; Object Lessons, the nineteenth-century method of teaching through structured observation of physical objects; and Threshold Concepts, the framework identifying gateway ideas within a discipline that transform a learner's understanding once grasped. Does not belong here: a psychological account of how a learner processes, retains or is motivated to engage with material once instruction is designed, which sits in one of the learning-mechanism groups instead.