of special education to systematically adapt learning for students
with disabilities. Connie Moss and Susan Brookhart (2012) and
others have rened the idea of the objective in lesson design with
the notion of the lesson’s purpose as a “learning target” that teacher
and student pursue together, a tting adjustment for personalization.
Melinda Sota (2016) goes one step further in describing how to co-
design all of instruction with students. Adaptation, differentiation, and
personalization all require meticulous planning, often efciently aided
by technology, in the process of instructional design.
Instructional design has long been at home in training
programs in the business sector and the military, easily ts the
mechanics of digital programming, and has been professionalized
through organizations such as the International Society for
Performance Improvement (ISPI), the eLearning Guild, and the
American Society for Training and Development. A discussion of
instructional design easily takes the color of the tightly prescriptive
planning that is a feature of both a strongly behavioristic
(programmed) approach to teaching and methods to manage the
complexities of differentiation. Instructional design as the foundation
of personalized learning carries threads of these two inuences but
also opens the door to greater variety in learning paths, particularly
as chosen by the learner. Even so, the boundaries and supports
necessary to high degrees of learner freedom require the considered
intent of design.
SUPPORTING RESEARCH
Instructional design as a body of research and practice evolved out of traditional teacher
lesson planning under the strong inuence of behavioral psychology (Skinner, 1954, 1968) as it
was being applied to training programs in business and the military. Benjamin Bloom’s (1971)
mastery learning varied time toward preset learning objectives. Robert Mager’s (1962) writing on
performance-based objectives and criterion-referenced instruction objectied school learning,
reducing the curriculum to measurable pieces. Robert Gagne (1975, 1977; Gagne & Briggs, 1979)
broke the process of learning into segments and named three tasks of the teacher: (1) design
instruction, (2) manage instruction, and (3) evaluate instruction. The standards movement of
the 1990s resulted in the universal ascendancy of outcome-based education, structuring the
organization of lessons to reach predetermined objectives and standards. Margaret C. Wang’s book,
Adaptive Education Strategies: Building on Diversity (1992), and her related research and publications
proffered an Adaptive Learning Environments Model (ALEM) with methods for individualizing
instruction and managing classrooms that included students with widely divergent abilities and
needs.
Carol Ann Tomlinson popularized and provided research substantiation for instructional
differentiation, beginning with her 1995 book, How to Differentiate Instruction in the Mixed Ability
Classroom. Robert Marzano (2007, 2009, 2017 for example) has identied, cataloged, and explained
a multitude of essential instructional methods, all of which benet from careful inclusion in well-
designed lessons. Universal design for learning (UDL) (Hall, Strangman, & Meyer, 2011; Hall, Meyer, &
Rose, 2012; Cothren Cook, Rao, & Cook, 2016) has merged universal design theory with the need
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INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN
