Incidental and relevant learning with instructional objectives.

Abstract

It was hypothesized that one role of objectives in learning is to serve as orienting stimuli by which the learner can decide which material to concentrate on, and which to pay less attention to With a brief text to learn, 58, college students received either onehalf of the 24 objectives' for the text, or no objectives at all. As expected, the Ss with half of the objectives performed better than their counterparts without objectives on the posttest items refere led to their objectives (relevant learning), and less well on the items not covered by their objectives (incidental learning). That these findings conflict with previous research results with respect to incidental learning, could result from the fact that the Ss in the present study had practical experience with an objective-referenced instructional model. INCIDENTAL AND RELEVANT LEARNING WifIl INSTRUCTIONAL OBJECTIVES Philippe C. Duchastel Florida State University Much research has been done and is presently being conducted on the effects of instructionalobjectives in learning. One aspect of that research has addressed the question as to whether providing students with advance knowledge of the instructional objectives for a unit of Instruction will facilitate their learning of that unit. A review of the results obtained in this area has recently been completed (Duchastel & Merrill, 1972), and points to the great variability involved in the conclusions drawn from these research efforts. Although a number of studies have failed to support the hypothesis that students provided with objectives will achieve more than subjects unaware of the objectives, a sufficient number of investigations have confirmeid the hypothesis to come to an affirmative opinion on the question. Indeed, if the hypothesis was not founded, the number of studies reporting significant differences would be merely 5%, i.e., the chosen Type I error

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