by Dr. Joel Gardner, EdTech Dojo co-curator

There is a lot of research on how to teach and design instruction effectively, and it can be difficult to determine which approach is most effective and useful. 

One well-known researcher, Dr. David Merrill, attempted to synthesize several decades of research into an integrated set of principles and strategies for teaching effectively. He called these the First Principles of Instruction (Merrill, 2002). I have spent several years studying these and other instructional principles, and have found them very powerful; however, they can be difficult to apply in practical ways.

To help make these First Principles more approachable and useful, I did a review of literature that synthesized several articles and demonstrated how these principles can be applied in practical, meaningful ways. This article (Gardner, 2010) was published in Educational Technology Magazine and (1) teaches what these principles are, (2) shares examples from the scholarly literature of how they have been used in the past, (3) and provides a useful template for planning your own training and instruction.

You can access the full article here:

http://joelleegardner.blogspot.com/2011/10/article-applying-merrills-first.html

Reference:
Merrill, M. D. (2002). First principles of instruction. Educational Technology Research and Development, 50(3), 43-59.