Instructional Technology Research

by Thomas C. Reeves, Ph.D.
Instructional Technology, The University of Georgia

Paper presented on April 27, 2000 at Session 41.29,
“International Perspectives on Instructional Technology Research for the 21st Century,” a
Symposium sponsored by SIG/Instructional Technology at the Annual Meeting of the
American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA, USA.

Several years ago, Professor Dave Merrill from Utah State University drew a
metaphorical line in the sand that called for anyone committed to serious nstructional technology research to join him and his associates in pursuing an empirical research agenda based upon the fact that instruction is a science (Merrill, Drake, Lacey, & Pratt, 1996). He also contended that instructional design is a technology derived from the science of instruction based upon principles that could be verified by empirical data.
Not everyone in or out of academe shares Professor Merrill’s positive assessment of instructional design as a scientifically valid technology. Consider the following quote from Professor Lauren Resnick from the University of Pittsburgh. (These remarks were made at the 1999 AERA Meeting in Montreal, Canada when Dr. Resnick responded to a question from the audience about what kinds of people could do “design experiments” of the kind she was advocating to advance educational practice.)
Resnick said:
We don’t have a well-developed design field in education, as a design field. So in our work, we do lots of design. Who’s doing it? Well, there are some people who’ve traveled in from research that are doing it. There are some people who came from the world of schools, therefore practitioners, who turn out to have a tremendous flair for getting it shaped and codified so that others, besides themselves or a small in-group, can do it. I’ve looked around at the field called instructional design in which people can get degrees, and so far have not been interested in hiring any of the people with those degrees who have crossed my path. Just doesn’t look like they were going to add much. In an hour of so and
across this week, I will be interviewing students from some of the people here and some others of you who are out in the audience who I don’t think have the word design on their curriculum vitae, but who look pretty promising to be the kinds of people we’re talking about. So the real issue has to do with what would a design field in education that would be serious actually look like.
There is an enormous gap between Merrill’s identification of instructional design as a robust technology derived from the science of instruction and Resnick’s conclusion that instructional design is a field that does not seem to contribute to the solution of educational problems. Unfortunately, the debate about the value of instructional technology as a field is not limited to the Ivory Tower. The cover story in the April 2000 issue of Training magazine (Gordon & Zemke, 2000) is titled “The Attack on ISD.”

According to the authors, “The ‘systems approach’ to instructional design is the training industry’s guiding light. Some of the best minds in the business now say it’s leading us astray.” Reflecting similar doubts, Dr. Bob Kozma of SRI, serving as a discussant for a session on applications of instructional theory and design in technology at the AERA conference in Montreal stated that instructional technology as a field is inward and backward focused, too disconnected from research and development in other fields, and insufficiently influenced by significant advances in technology (Ross, 1999).
Of course, many, if not most, fields of inquiry are beset with such controversies today. For example, in biology, one camp of scientists is laboring mightily to explain the nature of human behavior on the basis of genetic mapping whereas another camp argues that human behavior will ultimately be explained more completely by the effects of nurture and culture. If instructional technology (IT) research can be regarded as a field of inquiry, then it too must have its controversies. One of the most obvious disputes is between those who view IT as a branch of science or technology and those who regard IT as more akin to a craft or even an art (Clark & Estes, 1998). Another controversy concerns whether instructional technologists should conduct basic research to build generalizable theories or pursue applied research to solve specific problems.

More detailed articles can be downloaded here: Enhancing the Worth of Instructional Technology Research through