Focus on Teaching and Learning
Instructional Research and Development: A Case Study
Chuck Spuches -- Director, Instructional Development, Evaluation and Services
James Coufal -- Professor Emeritus, Forestry Faculty
The following is excerpted from
Spuches, C.M. & Coufal, J. E. (2000). Focusing on process to improve learning: A case study of instructional research and development. Innovative Higher Education, Vol. 24, No. 3; and the introduction to
Coufal, J. E. & C. M. Spuches (1995). Environmental Ethics in Practice: Developing a Personal Ethic: A Guidebook for Natural Resources Management Instructors. Syracuse, N.Y.: SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
This project was supported, in part, by a grant from the USDA Higher Education Challenge Grants Program. For further information and to order.
This article describes a collaborative project undertaken to create a faculty resource guide, Environmental Ethics in Practice. We focus on the instructional research and development (IRD) process we employed and the resulting instructional product. Although IRD is an established process, it is largely underutilized in favor of an artistic / intuitive approach to instructional design and development. We wish to show faculty and administrators that IRD is a useful and accessible process that individuals can employ on their own or collaboratively with similar educational projects in all disciplines. A related article that describes additional curricular and content aspects of Environmental Ethics in Practice is
Coufal, J.E., & Spuches, C.M. (1995). Ethics in the forestry curriculum: A challenge for all foresters. Journal of Forestry, 93(9), 30-34.
Our project reflects our response to a vision expressed by John Lemons, Chair of the Division of Life Sciences at the University of New England.
We conclude that there is a compelling need to explicitly and comprehensively intergrate environmental values and ethics into the curriculum so that both graduates of liberal arts environmental programs and professionally trained environmental managers are better able to understand and slove environmental problems (Lemons, 1989, p.133).
In keeping with Lemons’ philosophy, our Environmental Ethics project sought to integrate environmental ethics content into the academic preparation of environmental and natural resources managers and to elevate the importance of ethics on faculty agendas. Ultimately, our approach involved the creation and dissemination of a faculty resource guide consisting of a set of environmental ethics materials, Environmental Ethics in Practice.
To accomplish our project goals, we adapted and collaboratively employed an instructional research and development (IRD) process that emphasized project-specific formative evaluation throughout the design, development, and dissemination phases.
Instructional Research and Development
Borg and Gall (1983) describe Instructional Research and Development (IRD) as "a process used to develop and validate educational products." The term "product" distinguishes between instructional programs and their component parts and refers to instructional materials, modules, and methods.
The phrase "Instructional Research and Development" has changed over time. IRD was replaced first by the term Instructional Technology and later became Instructional Design and Development. Nevertheless, we prefer the notion of IRD as a conceptual basis for our effort because it conveys a view of technology as process rather than hardware. Moreover, it suggests that our experiences were guided as much by empirical research as by academic philosophy and discipline (Borg & Gall, 1983).
Our Project
Generally, our IRD project followed five stages (Figure 1):
- Define the problem / need as clearly as possible.
- Analyze the need to generate alternatives and select from among alternatives.
- Design / Develop the most viable and optimal solution mix.
- Conduct an implementation field test.
- Evaluate and revise the product based upon information and results.
Figure 1: Key elements in the instructional research and development process.
Project Organization and Management
The authors served as co-directors for the project, with support from a graduate research assistant. The co-directors had very different but essential and highly collaborative roles in this project. As a professor of natural resources management, Coufal’s role was to provide leadership and expertise in the substantive content areas of environmental ethics and natural resources management. He provided both a command of the literature and knowledge of the relationship of environmental ethics to natural resources management professional practice.
As director of instructional development and evaluation, Spuches’ role was to provide instructional design and educational project management expertise and to draw on experiences with similar IRD projects (see Evensky & Spuches, 1989; Spuches & Evensky, 1991; Spuches & Florini, 1987). Moreover, his role was to serve as a facilitator, guiding the project and participants through the design, development, evaluation, and production phases. This often entailed chairing meetings, generating memoranda, and managing various resource and support people. As Diamond (1989) explains:
.one of the most useful people on a project is someone with teaching or professional experience outside the content area involved..…an instructional developer is a trained professional who has experience in design, understands teaching and the use of technology and, most importantly, can work well with faculty in a supportive role. By coming to the project without the discipline's vocabulary and without the traditional viewpoints of the profession, this person can test assumptions and, without being a threat, question what is being done and why (Diamond, 1989, p. 13).
We targeted a diverse group of faculty for the final products of our research and development project. This group included faculty specializing in biology, ecology, forestry, and other fields who may or may not have formal education in ethics.
Summary
Environmental Ethics in Practice is an integrated set of instructional units that will help instructors introduce environmental and natural resources managers to the ethical dimensions of environmental issues and problems. The materials are intended for use in upper-division undergraduate courses and in professional continuing education programs. Instructors can integrate the units into existing courses or use them as the basis for new courses, workshops, and independent study projects. While the materials will be useful in many environmentally-oriented courses, the focus is on natural resources management.
The organizing framework for the contents of Environmental Ethics in Practice is the Integrative Environmental Ethics Model (IEEM). The IEEM portrays three major elements for analyzing professional ethical issues of the environment and natural resources: role, worldview, and ethical principles. The IEEM does not imply that these are the only elements. Rather, it serves as an analytical tool, useful for "unpacking" ethical dilemmas.
Each unit has a particular focus:
Unit 1 introduces the roots, development, nature, and impact of environmental ethics in land use allocation and management decisions at all levels;
Unit 2 introduces models useful for identifying and including the ethical dimensions of environmental problems in decision making, which establishes a base for practical skills; and
Unit 3 includes case problems, an approach particularly well suited to the study of environmental ethics. A reflective piece and several real and fictitious case problems are provided. They depict incidents of environmental ethics dilemmas and prompt analysis and discussion.
References
Borg, W. R., & Gall, M.D. (1983). Educational research (4th ed.). New York: Longman.
Coufal, J. E., & Spuches, C.M. (1995). Environmental ethics in practice: Developing a personal ethic. Materials for natural resources management instructors. Syracuse: SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
Coufal, J.E., & Spuches, C.M. (1995). Ethics in the forestry curriculum: A challenge for all foresters. Journal of Forestry, 93(9), 30-34.
Diamond, R.M. (1989). Designing and improving courses and curricula in higher education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Diamond, R.M. (1998). Designing and assessing courses and curricula. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Evensky, J., & Spuches, C.M. (1989). The Syracuse University experience: Lessons in multiteacher course design. The Journal of Economic Education, 20, 181-198.
Lemons, J. (1989). The need to integrate values into environmental curricula. Environmental Management, 13, 133-147.
Spuches, C.M., & Evensky, J. (1991). Instructional improvement revisited: Lessons in strategic design. The Journal of Staff, Program, and Organization Development, 9, 205-213.
Spuches, C.M., & Florini, B.M. (1987). Sensitizing industrial designers to gerontology: instructional modules that bridge the gap. Innovation: The Journal of the Industrial Designers Society of America, 6(3), 22-24.