DE Oracle @ UMUC

Designing for Success with the Seven Principles

Gretchen Jones

Academic Director, Foreign Languages and Asian Studies

School of Undergraduate Studies

Published: July-August 2010

Category: » Online-pedagogy » Teaching-strategies

In its current curriculum redesign project, the School of Undergraduate Studies is using the instructional design principles laid out in Chickering and Gamson’s (1987) Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. These guidelines, developed from many years of research, indicate that instructors and students—as well as administrators—can work together to create a more effective teaching and learning environment. The seven principles are as follows:

• Communicate high expectations
• Respect diverse talents and ways of learning
• Encourage active learning
• Give prompt feedback
• Encourage cooperation among students
• Encourage student-faculty contact
• Emphasize time on task

These "common sense" principles are applicable to a variety of educational levels, useful for any academic discipline, and meaningful to all types of learners. Moreover, the guidelines suggest that good instructional methods are every bit as important as academic content in helping students acquire and apply knowledge.

During the recent design of CHIN 111 Elementary Chinese, the development team used the seven principles to create an engaging, completely online foreign language course. During the design and development process, the seven principles were integrated with David Merrill’s (2002) First Principles of Instruction to build a highly interactive and immersive learning environment. The course won the Maryland Distance Learning Association (MDLA) Course of the Year award in 2009 and the University Continuing Education Association (UCEA) Distance Learning Community of Practice Meritorious Course Award in 2010. The details below demonstrate how Chickering and Gamson’s principles were incorporated into CHIN 111:

Communicate High Expectations: CHIN 111 consists of nine lessons and is carefully structured to gradually scaffold students to higher-level learning, while at the same time reinforcing skills already learned. Each lesson begins with clearly stated, specific, measurable learning objectives and a printable checklist to ensure that students complete all the written, spoken, listening, and reading assignments at the end of the week. Following Merrill’s Activation Principle, a warm-up exercise for each module exposes students to the topic of the unit, asking them to recall knowledge they have already learned, and then stimulates them to reach beyond into new material in a low-stakes yet challenging way.

Respect Diverse Talents and Ways of Learning: The centerpiece of the course is seven animated videos, licensed from an outside vendor called Active Chinese. The seven videos have three settings which allow students to 1) immerse themselves in a Chinese dialogue played at natural speed, 2) play the dialogue slowly with English pop-ups, or 3) play the dialogue line-by-line with text in the pinyin transliteration system, Chinese vernacular characters, or English translation, as the learner chooses. In addition to audio, the videos employ graphic tone direction markers and color coding, as well as Chinese characters and pinyin to accommodate multiple learning modalities and student needs. With these videos, students experience language in context, as it is actually used to accomplish real-life tasks. With multiple learning objects, students are able to manipulate the content in a manner that best suits their particular learning style.

Encourage Active Learning and Give Prompt Feedback: Grammar that emerges out of the contextualized video presentation is explained in a narrative fashion because adult language learners often prefer extensive explanations. To make these sections more interactive, vocabulary and example sentences that illustrate grammatical principles are recorded by native speakers of Chinese (including both male and female voices, with a range of ages), which provides students with substantial audio input that they can play as often as needed. Two types of application exercises with automatic feedback follow grammar points, which empower students to try what they have learned and to immediately reinforce their learning. When students feel confident in their skills, they end the lesson with an online quiz, with results reported to both the instructor and the student. These scaffolded task-based assessments lead students from memorization to comprehension, application, and finally synthesis, with a consistent and prompt feedback loop.

Encourage Cooperation Among Students: Because understanding the culture is an essential component of language learning, images, Web links, and other materials enrich students’ experience of the course and knowledge of Chinese life and culture in addition to language. For example, an interactive map of the Chinese Diaspora asks students to identify different countries in which Chinese is spoken, expanding knowledge of relevant geography as well as language. Each lesson contains an Application of Language Skills section, which includes various activities that ask students to work collaboratively to find information on Chinese life, such as train schedules and other vital information, as well as to practice specific language skills. The intent of this section is to have students use authentic online materials to work on real-life tasks; this helps students feel that the language they learn in each lesson is useful and connected to actual situations they may encounter. Through completing real-life tasks, students also obtain opportunities to explore cultural elements. Thus, the modules express the idea that linguistic competency cannot be separated from understanding the cultural aspects of a society. This is also in accordance with the language learning standards developed by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

Encourage Student-Faculty Contact: All four competency skills—speaking, listening, reading, and writing—are addressed in the course. Oral production and additional listening comprehension are accomplished outside the course modules through the use of Wimba software, which allows students to communicate with the instructor, teaching assistant, and each other synchronously and asynchronously with the use of a microphone and speakers. 

Emphasize Time on Task: All of the learning activities are focused on the essential goal of a lesson, and they allow students to integrate what they have learned up to that point. The careful focus and building of one element on another reinforces previous learning, and it also reduces time spent on unnecessary work. In this sense, the course also meets Merrill’s Integration and Task-Centered Principles, including activation of prior experience, demonstration of skills, application of skills, and integration or these skills into real-world activities. This approach makes the most of the time spent learning.

The seven principles can be a useful starting point for considering how to improve one’s own teaching and facilitating, especially in online courses. As demonstrated here, they can also be built directly into the design of a course to create an even stronger learning community upfront.

Resources

Chickering, A. W., & Gamson, Z. (1987). Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. AAHE Bulletin, 40(7), 3-7. Retrieved from http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/7princip.htm

Merrill, M. D. (2002). First principles of instruction. Educational Technology Research and Development, 50(3), 43-59. Retrieved from http://mdavidmerrill.com/Papers/firstprinciplesbymerrill.pdf