Learning Strategies

Instructional Hierarchy

The link between assessment and learning has been well documented and endorsed as a primary characteristic of effective teaching models. Child performance may be characterized in terms that link directly to instructional techniques of demonstrated effectiveness for that particular performance. Therefore, performance-based assessment before instruction is essential to determine prior knowledge that each child brings to the learning task. Regardless of the philosophies that teachers and researchers bring to understanding and promoting learning, the integration of performance assessment and instruction has broad utility and applicability to learning and may be incorporated within all approaches to instruction.

It is helpful to view learning as occurring in stages: initial learning for accuracy or quality; practice for fluency and endurance; and application, or combination of the components into new responses, to solve novel or more complicated problems. Hence, the instructional hierarchy is a useful heuristic for organizing learner proficiency and therefore identifying which strategies are likely to accelerate (and decelerate) learning for that particular learner. The instructional hierarchy has been widely and successfully used to design, implement, and evaluate interventions for children's academic performance problems.

The hierarchy contains four stages of learning: acquisition, fluency, generalization, and adaptation. Knowing the stage at which a learner's skill falls relative to goals for learning communicates to instructional facilitators exactly which training goals, performance measures, and associated set of instructional strategies will be most effective for that learner. The instructional hierarchy provides a framework for instructional decision making that is driven by learner competence. Specifically, the instructional hierarchy provides a system for translating a continuous variable like learning into categories of proficiency for a skill or series of skills drawn from the instructional objectives. The learner's performance or proficiency determines which instructional strategies will be most effective for that particular learner at that particular point in time. Hence, the instructional hierarchy provides a basis for implementing effective instructional strategies and for revising these strategies over time as learner skill improves (and new strategies are needed). Characteristics of learner performance and associated instructional strategies are described for each stage of the instructional hierarchy in the following sections.

...