Presentation Principles

Presentation Principles

Ruth Colvin Clark promotes these principles in her book: Building Expertise.

Guidelines for Introducing Lessons

1.       Make relevance obvious: Make the usefullness and benefits of new knowledge and skills obvious from the start.

2.       Activate relevant prior knowledge: Use advance organizers, pre-questions, and previews to help bring relevant knowledge into the student's working memory.

3.       Present learning objectives: Provide a clear statement of expected outcomes from a lesson.

Guidelines for Presenting Content

1.       Optimize mental capacity: Control the physical environment, minimize fatigue, and promote accountability for learning.

2.       Use pre-training to organize content: Teach relevant general concepts prior to teaching process stages or task steps.

3.       Minimize note-taking: Provide learners with notes because note-taking diverts attention and wastes valuable learning time.

4.       Build situational interest: Write and speak with well organized, concrete, but conversational language that engages learners.

5.       Signal attention: Call out the most important and relevant aspects of a lesson.

6.       Include worked examples: Provide demonstrations to illustrate task performance.

7.       Include analogies: Model features or functions of new content with illustrations of content from a different domain.