Evaluation of Instructional Design

I found the specificity and detail of the Chapter on Evaluation in Instructional Design to be important for teachers to take note of. In my opinion, many classroom teachers could benefit from additional professional development aimed at how to accurately assess student learning, and to plan further instruction based on those assessment results. I found Kirkpatrick's 4 Level Model of Training Evaluation particularly useful to incorporate into my own evaluation of curriculum, in addition to teacher made assessments, and mandated state ones. Of the components of the model: Reaction, Learning, Behavior, and Results, I found the section on Transfer of learning especially significant. Educational Design evaluation includes measures to see if the skills learned in the design environment are transferred to the work environment. Education, specifically secondary education could do much more to assess transfer and application of classroom learning to the real world. Some of the activities that I can think of at the moment include problem or project based learning, which is also discussed in the text; and incorporating media into lessons for students to construct knowledge (as well as present it). Giving students authentic audiences for writing, by having students write letters, blogs, journals, stories, book reviews, etc stress many of the same skills as a traditional essay, but give them an audience to do so. This may help students see the ultimate value in writing well, when students write for more than just a teacher.
I found table 10.2 Factors facilitating transfer of training to be an appropriate set of questions that could be adopted for classroom use. Reflection is an important part of evaluation and the questions identified can help prompt more of it in my classroom.