33-13 Conclusion

Lepper and Chabay (1985) succinctly summarize the problem of differentially providing learners with control over their own instruction: "It is unlikely that any choice of level of control will be optimal for all students, or even that the same level of control will be optimal for a single student for all activities or in all situations" (p. 226). Of the many approaches for accommodating differences among learners, one is to allow them to adapt the instruction themselves to meet their own needs as they see fit. Instruction would not be linear and lockstep; that is, all students could receive different instructional events. This strategy is not as highly prescriptive or determined or complicated as branching or other adaptive schemes sometimes found in computer-based approaches. Rather, learner control is a way of allowing individual differences to exert a positive influence without trainer control or intervention based on these individual differences. However, great care needs to be exercised by designers in constructing their learner-controlled lessons to optimize effectiveness for all types of learners.

In sum, after all that has been written about the virtues of giving trainees control over their own learning, such activities alone offer no guarantee of successful learning. This might have been forecast by Dewey, that strong proponent of experiential education, who voiced concerns about unconditional learner self-management: "The ideal aim of education is creation of the power of self-control. But the mere removal of external control is no guarantee for the Production of self-control" (1938, p. 64).