THE INTERACTION OF INSTRUCTIONAL REPRESENTATION AND APTITUDE FOR PERFORMING STATISTICAL QUALITY-CONTROL TASKS

Due to the fast pace of changing technologies and increasing job requi rements for cognitive skills, workers are forced to update their cogni tive skills continually. Consequently, there is a demand in current ma nufacturing environments for a training program that can improve cogni tive task performance of workers. Instructional design is a key step i n the design of training programs. Research in Aptitude Treatment Inte raction (ATI) and Instructional Systems Development (ISD) is reviewed in this study, and an integrative approach for instructional design is derived. Results from this study indicate that individual difference in prior achievement is a significant determinant of performance on st atistical quality control (SQC) tasks. Also, with the same familiarity level of domain concepts, subjects with higher prior achievement perf orm better than those with lower prior achievement when more instructi onal support in procedural instructional representation is presented. However, this evidence is not found with less instructional support in procedural instructional representation. It is concluded that instruc tional design in SQC or related task domains must account for the indi vidual difference in prior achievement and consider the instructional representation to facilitate the learning process and enhance task per formance. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.