A Review Of Marzano's Instructional Design Thoughts

Robert J. Marzano is a famous expert in curriculum reform in America, and he also has been as an advanced scholar of Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning in North America. Marzano who is pragmatic has been devoting himself to transforming instructional theory and research into classroom practice. At present, he has set up his educational research laboratory and combines theory with practice to research important instructional issues, involving instructional objectives, strategies and assessment and so on. Marzano doesn't use the term "instructional design" obviously in his works and papers. However, he has come into being an unique instructional design system according to its three essential questions:Seting out instructional objectives-Marzano's new taxonomy of educational objectives, which bases on human learning behavior model, and includes knowledge system, cognitive system, metacognitive system and self system, employs a two-dimensional framework to elaborate how to set out instructional objectives. Knowledge system contains information, mental procedure and psychomotor procedure, and all of them possess six mental processing levels, involving retrieval, comprehension, analysis, knowledge utilization, metacognitive system and self system. In other words, every instructional objective we set out according to Marzano's new taxonomy will contain two dimensionalities of types of knowledge and mental processing levels.Selecting instructional strateges-Marzano's comprehensive framework for effective instruction comprises three instructional strateges about transfer, management and organization. Regard to the instructional transfer strateges, Marzano not only put forward the strateges of establishing and communicating learning goals; tracking student progress and celebrating success; interacting with new knowledge; practicing and deepening the understand of new knowledge, and applying the knowledge, but summarizes some sub-strateges, such as identifying similarities and differences; summarizing and note taking; reinforcing effort and providing recognition; homework and practice; nonlinguistic representations; cooperative learning; setting objectives and providing freeback; generating and testing hypotheses; cues, questions, and advance organizers, so as to put the transfer strateges into practice. As for instructional management strateges, Marzano proposes five strateges of engaging students, establishing or maintaining classroom rules and procedures, recognizing and acknowledge adherence to and lack of adherence to classroom rules and procedures, establishing and maintaining effective relationships with students, and communicating hign expectations for all students, so as to facilitate teaching activities and process. And the key factor to put classroom management is constructing effective teacher and student relationship. Let's look at instructional organization stratege, it reflects knowledge-based, issue-based or students' inquiry-based unit design stratege. Once the unit theme is set up, a teacher might base on three lesson segments of establishing instruction routines, addressing academic content and planning for actions that must be taken on the pot to systematically map out instruction segements in one class period.Identifying instructional assessment-as for this issue, Marzano emphasizes classroom teaching assessment. On one hand, he summarizes various of assessment methods, for example, forced-choice items, short-constructed response items, essay question, oral task, performance assessment, teacher observation, and student self-assessment, then use different methods to assess different knowledge and competence. On the other hand, he regards rubric as the most important tool to represent assessment outcomes, and matches rubric assessment with six mental processing levels of new taxonomy to design relative assessment methods, consequently to reflect the consistency between objectives and assessments.In brief, we can evaluate Marzano's instructional design thoughts from three aspects. Firstly, the unique features of his thoughts, which might be reflected from the peculiarities of new taxonomy of educational objectives, the systematicness and practicality of instructional strateges, and the flexibility and diversity of instruction assessment. Secondly, the localizational significance of his thoughts, which might be relected from its theoretical and pratical significance to the instructional design of secondary and primary schools in our country, and the constraint during the localization process. Thirdly, the limitations of his thoughts, which might be relected from the relative ambiguity about the guidance of helping teachers determine the nature of knowledge, the objectivity about the application of instructional strateges which is more suitable for high-capability teachers, and the incompleteness about the matching of classroom teaching assessments.