Development and Evaluation of a Decision Support Tool to Incorporate Redundancy in the Development of Instructional Materials

Novice Instructional Designers (IDs) often struggle to perform at the same level as experts. Specialized knowledge and experience are needed to discover the challenges and device appropriate solutions. Scaffold, guides, and heuristics can help novice when needing to perform tasks that require specialized knowledge. One common instructional design task requiring specialized knowledge is the development of instructional materials. Instructional message design (IMD) is a problem solving process to improve the quality of instructional materials through the application of research based principles. As this process is often not covered in novice IDs training, they will encounter more issues while attempting to address the challenges that come with creating instructional materials. Using a developmental study, a decision support tool was created to assist novice IDs with applying IMD, specifically the redundancy principle due to its ability to improve the communication within the materials. This study describes the operationalization of the principle, the design and development of the tool, expert review and revisions made based on their feedback, and the implications from the development of such a tool.