How Does Learning Work?
- Brigid McCormick
- Dec 24, 2024
- 2 min read
Susan Meyer Markle was a brilliant educator whose work on instructional design, including component/composite relations, is foundational in understanding how to break down and structure learning for efficiency. Together with Philip Tiemann, she detailed these concepts in Analyzing Instructional Content: A Guide to Instruction and Evaluation (1983), which is available here today! Markle emphasized the importance of designing instructional content that supports skill acquisition by dividing complex concepts into simpler, teachable units. Her principles help educators guide learners through progressive stages, ensuring that each component skill is mastered before integrating it into broader, composite tasks.
Think of a brick wall: if there’s a strong foundation, the top bricks lay easily and quickly. If you have an uneven or unsturdy foundation, it is difficult or impossible to get new “skills” to settle into a repertoire. We see this a lot with skills like answering wh-questions: educators spend a lot of time on teaching and answering wh-questions across concepts, when the learners don’t have the foundational content skills to even answer the question! When it comes to teaching wh-questions, the skill being taught should be who = person (name, pronoun, professional), what = adjective, verb, noun, where = place. The teaching should be in the discrimination of the question types (e.g., a child answers “bus” for “where do you go to school?”), but when teaching extends beyond that, teaching the actual colors, or names, or verbs, then you’re no longer teaching answering questions, you’re teaching the concept of nouns, adjectives, or otherwise. There’s a component skill missing (the more basic skill) that’s required to successfully engage in the higher-level skill, which is the composite skill.
What Does This Mean for My Student?
If you notice that skills have to continually be retaught, are memorized, or are demonstrated in a controlled setting but aren’t showing up in day-to-day life, there is likely a component skill missing. At Educational Momentum, we’re instructional designers and are well-acquainted with skill building from the ground up. The difficult thing about traditional classrooms is that teachers have to teach to the middle of the class, and as much as they try to differentiate instruction, there just isn’t enough resources to focus on filling in the gaps in the learning structure. But that’s why we’re here!
By embracing and truly understanding the concept of component/composite relations, educators can better support students in building comprehensive skill sets that empower them to navigate complex challenges both in and out of the classroom.
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