This activity in the working out of a design is something which is going on intuitively and automatically when you have had some experience in working out designs. This is because, as you come to work out a thought-up design, the criteria for a good design which helped you think it up have taken on an imperative ring.
In thinking up a design, criterion 1, for example, said that ‘a good design generates an active (not passive) learning situation’. It now gives the command: ‘Generate an active (not passive) learning experience.’
Criterion 2, which said that ‘a good design utilizes didactically meaningful responses and excludes non-meaningful responses’, now gives the command: ‘Utilize didactically meaningful responses and exclude non meaningful responses.’ The remaining criteria now command you to:
Criterion 3: Exercise the appropriate degree of control over the learning process.
Criterion 4: Respect but outwit constraints.
Criterion 5: Provide the learner with feedback.
Criterion 6: Make critical use of media.
Criterion 7: Extend as needed.
Criterion 8: Base your decision on the specified needs.
As your decision-making shifts to working out a design and you begin to use the criteria for a good design, you begin to work for them.
Would you like to exercise your understanding of these criteria and their importance when working out a design? If you would, take the time to look for the influence of the criteria in the descriptions of worked-out designs in the two case studies which follow. You will find that these criteria are certainly helping control the quality of S-R events, while never telling you how to work out a design. This is something your intuition, creativity, and logical thinking have to do as you respond to the directives from the design you have thought up and must now work out.