Integration

First Principles Integration.png

Integration: Overview

Your instructional goal must be the learners who know what to do with the newly learned information. If they have information without knowing how and when to use, your instruction has not reached its goal. This situation is similar to having the latest version of a smartphone, but still using it only for phone calls because you do not know what to do with other features. Citing research on instruction, Merrill (2007, p. 13) Links to an external site. suggests integration activities should provide:

  1. Techniques that encourage learners to integrate (transfer) the new knowledge or skill into their everyday life.
  2. Opportunity for the learner to publicly demonstrate their new knowledge or skill.
  3. Opportunity for learners to reflect-on, discuss, and defend their new knowledge or skill ƒ
  4. Opportunity for learners to create, invent, or explore new and personal ways to use their new knowledge or skill.

Examples of Integration Instructional Activities

Examples of types of integration phase activities include:

  • Ponder activities aid your learners to think broadly and deeply about a topic.
  • Stories by learners encourage your learners to correlate new information with their life.
  • Job aids help your learners as a reminder to apply their learning to real-life situations.
  • Research activities are to encourage your learners discover and use own sources of information.

Ponder Activities

Ponder activities prompt your learners think deeply and broadly about the subject. They encourage your learners to examine their ideas from a new perspective. Types of ponder activities include:

  • Question or reflection prompts: Asking your learners rhetorical or reflection questions helps learners to make connections. Making the questions personal will require the learners to think about the subject and their world. Examples of questions can be:
    • Why do you think this is so?
    • What did this happen?
    • Where will this idea apply?
    • Where will it not apply?
    • How important is this idea to you?
    • What other results could you expect?
  • Cite example activities: This type of activity requires learners to identify existing examples.
  • Evaluations activities: This type of activity requires your learners to critically examine the importance and relevance of items of learning. These activities prepare learners to apply new knowledge by recalling needed information. When using evaluation activities, you may have your learners evaluate real-world examples (e.g., press release, advertisement, poster, organization chart, book jacket, review or synopsis, etc.) to relate the subject matter to real-world context.

Stories by the Learners

One way to promote the integration of new information into their life is to encourage them to retrieve events from their own lives. You can encourage your learners by sharing your story and asking them to share their stories. The invitation to tell a story adds the element of reflection and encourages learners to think about what is said and how it applies their own situations.

Job Aids

Job aids are instruction cards or wall charts that allow your learners to access the information they need when performing a task. Job aids can be quite handy when your learners apply new information. They can be used to provide help to someone performing a task right when and where they need it. There are different types of job aids, such as a checklist, reference summaries (cheat sheets), glossaries, and calculators.

Research Activities

Research activities require your learners to discover and use their own sources of information. You can use research activities to teach your learners how to gather, analyze, and report on information. Examples of research activities include:

  • Personal perspectives: Ask your learners to consider the research of all different perspectives to augment their own.
  • Scrapbooks: Ask your learners to create a scrapbook so that they can gather and organize their knowledge.
  • Day in the life: Have your learners research a real, historical, or fictional character and then ask them imagine how the character would use the new information in a typical day. 

Pause.png Before you move on ...

Circling back to the learning log you started at the beginning of this module, consider the instructional principle of integration. How do you think integration activities promote learning? 

Design Checkbox.png Your Design Decisions

Thinking about your target audience of learners, your lesson's objectives, and the learning context for the lesson you are designing, what types of integration activities could you incorporate into your lesson that would require learners to reflect on, discuss, use, or demonstrate the new skill or knowledge in their everyday life? What learner guidance would be needed within the integration activity?

When designing your integration activities, keep in mind that effective integration activities:

  • Prompt learners to reflect what they learn by describing their experiences and challenges.
  • Encourage your learners to apply new knowledge and skills into their life, or relate their new knowledge to future goals.