Welcome to the fourth and final part in the series “ADDIE: The Key to Instructional Design”. Today’s installment: Implementation. The ADDIE stage of implementation comes after the stages of analysis, design, and development. If you remember, in analysis, the entire situation is closely examined and necessary information about the project is gathered. Then, in design, the plan is put into writing. Next, in development, all the materials are finalized and everything is fully prepared for implementation. Implementation means that the instruction, training, teaching is finally done. This could be a single class or it could be an entire year’s course.
If the first three phases were well planned, the implementation should go smoothly. However, once the training has reached the implementation stage, the instructional designer’s job is not finished. First, the instructional designer is often the person who will also be the facilitator of the class or course. So they must now teach the class. Even if they are not the facilitator, they should train the teachers and conduct practice sessions (these could be considered either the end of the development stage or the beginning of the implementation). Instructional designers must continue their ongoing evaluation of instruction, just as they did during analysis, design, and development stages.
Kirkpatrick gives instructional designers 4 levels at which to evaluate training: reaction, learning, behavior, and results. Each subsequent stage depends on the preceding stage (much like ADDIE). There cannot be results without a change in behavior, and there is no change in behavior without learning, and there can be no learning if the training does not produce a reaction in the trainees. Let’s look at Kirkpatrick’s first two levels and how they apply to Interopia’s EFL games training.
The first level is reaction. During this level, the course designer assesses the first impressions of the learners, what they think and feel about the course. Did they find it worthwhile? It is important to know how the learners liked the instructor, course, and materials. One reason for this is that learners’ feeling towards their course will impact their motivation, engagement, and ultimately their learning. At the very end of my training session, the people attending will be encouraged to share their reactions on anonymous comment cards.
The second level of assessment is learning. Instead of focusing on what they think about the course, the learning level focuses on what they know and what they can do. The key to assessing learning is to look at the objectives of the course, laid out during the design of the project. If the course is successful, every learner should have fulfilled every objective; learning assessment verifies this has occurred. The training I designed had five objectives. A written assessment at the very end of the training session will test for one of these (the number of classroom games that the learner can remember and name). However, the other objectives cannot be tested for easily with a written test, so these will be evaluated through authentic assessment tasks. During the session itself, time allocated to evaluating students is limited, but video recordings will allow playback later, to closely examine the performance of each individual. After a month, follow-up in-person interviews will check to see if learners still remember the session and are applying what they learned in their classrooms. Be expecting our final EFL game training design to be posted in one week.
To learn more about Kirkpatrick’s four levels of training evaluation, check out this video!
Hodell, C. (2011). ISD from the ground up: A no-nonsense approach to instructional design (3rd ed.). United States of America: American Society for Training & Development.
Mind Tools. (2012). Kirkpatrick’s four-level training evaluation model. Retrieved from http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/kirkpatrick.htm
Tdmcgaughy. (2011). Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation . Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBpI0B5PtaA&feature=related
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