Component Display Theory

Background

In 1973, Merrill and Richard C. Boutwell published three basic principles of instructional psychology in the inaugural issue of Review of Research in Education: (1) objectives should be specified in terms of observable behavior, (2) assessments should reflect a student’s ability to perform the objective, and (3) instructional products should be empirically verified. According to Merrill (2008),

This need formed the basis of CDT, which was heavily influenced by Robert M. Gagné’s The Conditions of Learning. As Merrill and his team attempted to apply Gagné’s categories of learning to a number of empirically documented cases and to the emerging field of computer-based instruction, Merrill’s (2008) team came to the conclusion that Gagné’s categories were good but incomplete:

Thus, Merrill and colleagues focused on performance and content, creating a performance-content matrix for classifying instructional outcomes. This matrix contains three levels of performance— remember content, use content, and find new content—and four kinds of content— facts, concepts, procedures, and principles. Unlike Gagné’s categorization scheme, the performance-content matrix of CDT accommodates creative behavior in learning, such as defining new concepts, developing new procedures, and determining new principles, which are common and necessary for learning science, engineering, and computer programming, for example.

Primary Presentation Forms

Primary presentation forms are one important component of CDT. The notion of primary presentation forms were derived from Merrill’s memory of a lesson his [Page 139]father, a landscape painter, taught him when Merrill was boy. Wanting to be an artist like his father, Merrill had asked for a large box of crayons as a birthday gift, unaware that his family could not afford such a request. His father, without commenting on the gift request or the family’s financial situation, took just four crayons— red, yellow, blue, and black—and a piece of paper and colored a beautiful landscape. When Merrill received a box of eight crayons as a birthday present, his father reminded him of the landscape created with just four crayons and noted that Merrill now had four more crayons than he needed. Merrill (2008) reflects on the importance of this lesson: “I didn’t become an artist, but I never forgot my primary colors and how to combine them to get all the colors of the rainbow” (p. 149).

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