Beyond the Remedial Loop: Toward the Integration of Task and Learner Analysis for a Process Approach to Instructional Development.

The authors argue against the current view of task analysis which assumes that learning is a univariant process. They feel that learning is a multivariant process and that task analysis should also take into consideration an analysis of the learning task, the cognitive processes which affect the acquisition of the learning task, and the learner's personality variables which may interact with the task and/or process of acquisition. Task analysis techniques must go beyond the formal-procedural (training) domain into what is termed a "thematic-principle" domain. They propose three procedures for such an analysis: specification of an appropriate cognitive process, an analysis of task structure, and an analysis of the contribution of aptitude measures on task performance. To demonstrate the feasibility of such an analytical procedure, a developmental research project is described which involved the manipulation of several sequence variables. (JY)