Learner Verification of Instructional Materials

Abstract

Learner verification and revision (LV&R) is an empirical approach to increasing the probability that an instructional product will facilitate the learning it has been designed to transmit. The process aims to improve a product's instructional effectiveness incrementally during prepublication development, day-to-day postpublication use, and future revisions and editions. The process involves two interrelated activities: 1. Empirical and parsimonious investigations of whether the specific verbal and pictorial communications that constitute a given instructional material are, in fact, communicating to learners well enough for them to understand and to learn what the material is designed to teach. (This is done best by directly observing, testing, and interviewing small numbers of selected learners, using information from teachers, as needed.) 2. Use of this direct feedback from learners as a basis for making specific changes (revisions) in, (a) the content, format, method, etc., of the material itself (textual revision), and (b) the way the materials are being used (contextual revision). These investigations and revisions are not limited to the formative period of a product's life. is an extension of formation evaluation to a product's market life. While it is primarily the responsibility of publishers, may be, and is, carried out by teachers forced to make contextual revisions to make a product work with certain students. Therefore, contrary to the views of some of its advocates, and almost all of its adversaries, is not a means of proving to prospective purchasers that the product Rather, is a means of improving the extent to which an instructional product may be understood and used effectively by learners. The technology for proving that a product works-as well as or better than other products-is well established and broadly used by various developers and commercial publishers. It is also of limited, if not questionable, value. Validation is based on large-scale testing of a product in a representative sampling of schools. It usually entails a rather large financial investment (commonly viewed as a marketing expense) by the product's publisher. Because many commercial publishers refer to as LV&R, publishing validation reports as LV&R reports, they speak of as being too expensive. As a rule, studies report gains in group mean scores from pretest to posttest. These mean gain scores are, in essence, proof that the product works. Yet, if anything is proved by these expensive studies, it is that in any group of representative schools there is a sufficient number of high ability students who will learn enough from almost any instructional