Instructional Design Evaluation by Cheryl Calhoun, Shilpa Sahay, & Matthew Wilson talked about the necessity for evaluation when designing for learners to make sure the learning goals, materials, and methods are optimized through an iterative process. The reading also introduced the methods through which this evaluation can be done, which are formative, summative, and confirmative.

One of the most interesting concepts for me was how the authors talked about the effect on instructional designers as the learners and teachers react to the pedagogical components. In the reaction evaluation, it is mentioned: “Once it is determined that there is engagement by the learners, one may assume that learners will not drop out….It leaves less frustration and vagueness in the evaluator’s mind if one knows that all the learners are positively oriented towards undertaking the training.” It also made me think of how important it is for the instructional designer to see that there is a positive impact on the effort they are putting in.  

This was a helpful read that is relevant to the project we are currently working on. Through the past few weeks, we studied instructional design but having a clear outline on how to determine the efficacy of such design can help us incorporate the various feedbacks we have received into our next iterations. For example, in last week’s playtest with the instructors we were able to identify aspects of our project that would not fit well into the classroom setting we are designing for. Since we are in the formative phase of the evaluation discussed here, the questions about the learning objectives can be adopted to measure how our instructional design performs with the learners we will visit soon. 

I am curious to learn more about how we can perform the confirmative evaluation in the context we are designing (an afterschool program for middle schools) since one of the motivations for our team is to instill learning principles that learners can adopt long-term. This reminds me of the previous reading discussion on Melange of Making: Bringing Children’s Informal Learning Cultures to the Classroom because with our theme of cross-cultural electronics we want to encourage students to explore DIY-making culture beyond the classroom. How can formal education systems integrate and evaluate knowledge gained from experiment-based practical learning so that we can determine if our instructional design is effective?