Instructional Transaction Shells: Responsibilities, Methods, and Parameters

In this paper we suggest that an instructional transaction must carry out four responsibilities: knowledge selection, knowledge sequencing, interaction management, and interaction enactment. We have suggested that these responsibilities are accomplished via methods, which are sets of activities that enable each responsibility to be accomplished.All transactions include knowledge selection methods for partitioning knowledge, portraying knowledge, and amplifying knowledge; knowledge sequence methods for routing the learner through the selected knowledge and guiding the learner's advancement; interaction management methods for prioritizing interactions and expediting the learner's acquirement of the knowledge involved in the interaction; and interaction enactment methods for overviewing, presenting, and enabling practice, and assessing knowledge. Finally we have suggested that the way a given method carries out its activities is determined by a set of parameter values associated with this method. We have identified a number of parameter values associated with the methods of one type of transaction—an identify transaction.