Designing the Instructional Message
This chapter was very informative. I found that when the book discussed using objectives as pre-instructional strategies that I tended to agree that they were not as effective as other methods. My daughter's teachers are now required to inform the students which of the standards based objectives they are teaching to. The students really do not pay much attention to it but one teacher commented that it helped her stay on task-it serves as a reminder as to the purpose of the lesson. I have thought about pre-instructional strategies for my project and have yet to come up with any ideas. I'm waiting until I get to chapter 10 to see if maybe a pretest might be the most appropriate method. I am teaching a combination of facts and concepts so I'm not sure. I'm also unsure if there should be a pre-instructional strategy for each component or for the overall project.
I noticed in the "Message Design for Text" section that most instructional texts are presented with the same suggested font hierarchy. I have followed through in my project using a similar concept. I use large bold text, smaller bold text, plain text etc.
Pictures are a little more difficult. To this point I have not been able to come up with pictures that illustrate the message. The pictures I have used are to make the page more visually appealing to a population that traditionally shies away from reading.
Overall I found this chapter to be interesting and on the whole confirming what I have observed through the years.
Cheryl Briggs November 11, 2001