Providing differentiated instruction (DI) is considered an important but complex teaching skill which many teachers have not mastered and feel unprepared for. In order to design professional development activities, a thorough description of DI is required. The international literature on assessing teachers' differentiation qualities describes the use of various instruments, ranging from self-reports to observation schemes and from perceived-difficulty instruments to student questionnaires. We question whether these instruments truly capture the complexity of differentiation. In order to depict this complexity, a cognitive task analysis (CTA) of the differentiation skill was performed. The resulting differentiation skill hierarchy is presented here, together with the knowledge required for differentiation, and the factors influencing its complexity. Based on the insights of this CTA, professional development trajectories can be designed and a comprehensive assessment instrument can be developed, enabling researchers and practitioners to train, assess, and monitor teaching quality with respect to providing differentiated instruction.

Objectives-based instructional design approaches break down tasks into specific learning objectives and prescribe that instructors should choose the optimal instructional method for teaching each respective objective until all objectives have been taught. This approach is appropriate for many tasks where there is little relation between the objectives, but less effective for teaching complex professional tasks that require the integration of knowledge, skills, and attitudes and the coordination of different skills. For the latter, a task-centred approach that starts designing instruction from whole, real-life tasks, is more appropriate. This article describes one task-centred instructional design model, namely the Four-Component Instructional Design (4C/ID) model and illustrates its application by reflecting on three educational programs in higher education designed with 4C/ID. The first case presents a design for a course that focuses on the development of mobile apps at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. The second case illustrates the integration of information problem-solving skills at Iselinge University of Professional Teacher Education, a teacher training institute in the Netherlands. The third case is an example from general practice education at the KU Leuven, Belgium. Future developments and issues concerning the implementation of taskcentred educational programmes are discussed.

While most students seem to solve information problems effortlessly, research shows that the cognitive skills for effective information problem solving are often underdeveloped. Students manage to find information and formulate solutions, but the quality of their process and product is questionable. It is therefore important to develop instruction for fostering these skills. In this research, a 2-hour online intervention was presented to first-year university students with the goal to improve their information problem solving skills while investigating effects of different types of built-in task support. A training design containing completion tasks was compared to a design using emphasis manipulation. A third variant of the training combined both approaches. In two experiments, these conditions were compared to a control condition receiving conventional tasks without built-in task support. Results of both experiments show that students' information problem solving skills are underdeveloped, which underlines the necessity for formal training. While the intervention improved students' skills, no differences were found between the conditions. The authors hypothesize that the effective presentation of supportive information in the form of a modeling example at the start of the training caused a strong learning effect, which masked effects of task support.Limitations and directions for future research are presented.

No abstract

This paper describes how an interdisciplinary design team used the Four-Component Instructional Design (4C/ID) model and its accompanying Ten Steps design approach to systematically design a professional development program for teaching differentiation skills to primary school teachers. This description illustrates how insights from a cognitive task analysis into classroom differentiation skills were combined with literature-based instructional design principles to arrive at the training blueprint for workplace-based learning. It demonstrates the decision-making processes involved in the systematic design of each of the four components: learning tasks, supportive information, procedural information, and part-task practice. While the design process was time and resource-intensive, it resulted in a detailed blueprint of a five-month professional development program that strategically combines learning activities to stimulate learning processes that are essential for developing the complex skill providing differentiated instruction in a mathematics lesson.

This paper introduces process modeling and mining as an approach to process analysis for CSCL. This approach is particularly relevant for collaborative learning that takes a project-based form, and is applied in this study to online chat data from teams working on a complex task. The groups differed in terms of the number of members and the amount of scaffolding aimed at group processes and task requirements. The models, produced using the HeuristicsMiner algorithm, showed that the group with fewer members that received more instruction in the task requirements had a more linear decision-making process than the group that received instruction in group processes, however neither were an example of a linear, unitary phase model. This approach has relevance both for CSCL research methods and for providing feedback to students on their decision-making processes.

Although students often appear to be skilled in retrieving and making use of information from the internet, research shows that their information problem solving skills are overestimated. They show deficiencies in many of the necessary skills, such as generation of search terms, selection of sources, and critical processing of information. It is therefore necessary to design and develop effective instruction to foster information problem solving skills. Research shows that learning from examples can be an effective approach for teaching complex cognitive skills in ill-structured domains, such as writing or communicating. To explore whether this also holds for information problem solving, this study investigates the effects of presenting a modelling example in an online information problem solving training. Results of two experiments show that viewing a modelling example, presented as a screencast of an expert thinking out loud and interspersed with cognitive prompts, leads to a higher posttest performance than performing a practice task. The effect persisted on a delayed posttest 1 week later.The results imply that information problem solving instruction in an online setting can benefit from employing video-based modelling examples. KEYWORDSexample-based learning, information problem solving, modelling example, prompting 1 | INTRODUCTION 1.1 | Information problem solving Information problem solving (IPS) is a skill often required from students in today's educational programs, as it is common for teachers to provide assignments requiring students to search for information on the internet. These assignments can be characterized as information problems: problems that require more information to solve than is currently available to the learner. They pose an information gap, because students must first search for the missing information and then process it in order to solve problem. Teachers might assume that searching and processing information automatically leads to learning, but such information problems are often ill-defined and present unknown or unclear task demands, goals, or solution paths. Although it is tempting to regard students as "digital natives" and expect that they automatically acquired skills to solve such problems, research shows that most students' IPS skills are underdeveloped. Students struggle to systematically search for information, evaluate it critically, and produce an adequate solution for an information problem (Frerejean, van Strien, Kirschner, & Brand-Gruwel, 2016;Walraven, Brand-Gruwel, & Boshuizen, 2008).An effective approach to solving an information problem can be summarized in five steps (e.g., the IPS-I model; Brand-Gruwel, Wopereis, & Vermetten, 2005; Brand-Gruwel, Wopereis, & Walraven, 2009). First, learners build a problem representation by reviewing the ---This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is no...

No abstract