Instructional design models are rarely tested against outcomes; their credibility comes from practitioners finding them useful.¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 source · q1 expert account · no effect size
Currency · newest study 2018 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person
Evidence quality · No study behind this claim is a peer-reviewed article with a DOI: it rests on a source with no registered publication record (a web page, book or unpublished report). It is kept because 2 design pages cite it; treat it as a lead to check, not an established finding.

The claim is about the evidence behind design models: ADDIE-based models, Dick and Carey, ASSURE and the rest. It is not about the learning principles those models draw on, which have their own evidence.

Subclaims¶

q1 i? Design models are rarely tested through rigorous assessment of their results against predetermined criteria; widely distributed models gain credibility from being found useful by practitioners, who adapt them to their conditions, so popularity serves as a form of validation. → Dousay 2018

Evidence¶

Dousay 2018¶

Dousay, T. A. (2018). Instructional design models. In Foundations of Learning and Instructional Design Technology (1st ed., pp. 277–295). EdTech Books. https://edtechbooks.org/lidtfoundations/instructional_design_models

q1 · expert account in a textbook chapter · i? · no effect size · n=34 models surveyed · theoretical · r?

A textbook chapter by a co-author of the Survey of Instructional Design Models (Branch & Dousay, 2015), which has covered 34 models across five editions. The chapter says, citing that survey, that models "are tested through rigorous assessment of their results against predetermined criteria" only rarely. Widely distributed and accepted models "gain their credibility by being found useful by practitioners, who frequently adapt and modify them to match specific conditions." It concludes that "popularity serves as a form of validation." The chapter asserts this rather than reviewing evaluation studies, so it is coded as expert account.

Discussion¶

What follows for design practice. A designer choosing a model cannot choose the proven one, because proof is mostly absent. The choice is a judgment about fit to the delivery format, the setting and the deliverable. See Selecting an Instructional Design Model.

Popularity and evidence are different warrants. This is the model-level version of the concern behind the wiki's treatment of widely cited opinion: something being standard in the field is not evidence that it works. The evidence for a design lives in the learning claims its steps rest on and in evaluation of the design itself, not in the model's standing.

Open question. The chapter does not survey the evaluation studies that do exist. A systematic review of design-model evaluations would test the claim directly, and would move it off q1.

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