| Educational situations can no longer provide learners with all the skills and knowledge needed to be successful in their daily lives. Learners need to be self-directed in order to meet the demands of more complex decision-making and problem solving. That is, learners need to able to assess what they know and can do, what they need to know and be able to do in different situations, and finally take steps to fill the gaps in their knowledge and skills. What are needed are better ways to provide people with opportunities and support for directing their own learning.; This dissertation project has developed an instructional-design theory that provides explicit guidelines for how to foster self-directed learning (SDL) concomitant to the learning of other content. This project used extensive literature review and analysis to develop the initial theory, which includes those instructional values, preconditions, outcomes, and methods with conditions necessary for fostering SDL. Then, expert reviewers were asked to provide feedback concerning the theory's apparent strengths and weaknesses. Strengths included the comprehensiveness of the work, and its overall importance to the domain of helping people become more self-directed. Weaknesses included unclear learning situations for the theory's implementation, the omission of the use of learning contracts, and the need for values concerning the importance of SDL.; Finally, this project presents conclusions derived from the experts' feedback, a revised theory based on those conclusions, and further required research. |
