Part-whole relationships in Merrill's First Principles of Instruction • M David Merrill • Instructional Design

6 minute read

A part-whole relationships component skill is associated with any entity, activity, or process which can be divided into parts. Merrill states that the defining property of this component skill is that “the name, location, and description of the parts to be remembered are associated with a single specific entity, activity, or process and cannot be generalised”. The learner’s goal is to locate, name, or describe a part of some object, event, activity or process. Like an acquisition of facts component skill, a part-whole relationships component skill is usually not the primary goal of a course but most commonly plays a supporting role. It is often prerequisite for the other component skills. For a conceptual component skill knowing the parts may be an essential property of a specific entity, activity, or process. For a procedural component skill, knowing the parts may be necessary to execute a specific step. For a process component skill, knowing the parts may be necessary to identify the adequacy of a condition in a specific process.

Part-whole relationships component skills require four content elements:

An illustration of the whole object or system.
A location indicator for each part.
A name for each part.
Descriptive information associated with each part.

Presentation and demonstration for part-whole relationships

For each part, the presentation should tell learners the part name and information about the part. The demonstration should show the location of each part with respect to the whole, avoid location cues and use chunking. Multimedia should follow Richard Mayer’s principles. I have written more on multimedia in my Strategies for designing effective multimedia for learning post. Learners should be given control over which items to view and how often to view them. I have written more on multimedia in my Strategies for designing effective multimedia for learning post.

Merrill advises against a passive approach in which a part is highlighted for learners along with the associated information because this may result in learners not fully paying attention to the location. He recommends that learners are asked to select each part in the whole in any order they choose. Once they have selected a part, then the name of the part and the information associated with the part are shown. In this way, they actively associate the location of the part with the name of the part and the information about the part. Learners should be allowed to explore the parts and to select any part they wish as many times as they feel necessary to learn the location, the part name and the associated information.

Location cues

There is a risk that learners will associate the label with the location of the label rather than with the location of the part under consideration. In the example below, two views of the brain are shown. If learners are first presented with only the lateral view they may then associate the label ‘frontal lobe’ with the location to the left of this specific brain diagram, rather than with the frontal lobe part itself. If learners are subsequently shown a variation of the diagram (for example the superior view) where the parts are located in different places, then they may not be able to locate the parts:

One way of preventing these location cues is to present all of the labels in the same location on the screen while highlighting the part under consideration:

Chunking

If there are a large number of parts, then this can overload learners’ working memory, therefore Merrill recommends that chunks of parts are used where chunk contains seven or fewer parts. I assume here (as Merrill doesn’t cite a source) that this is a reference to the work of Miller (1956 ), who speculated that people can remember about seven chunks in working memory tasks. However, later work by Cowan (2001), based on actual research, found that the average human adult can only keep four items in working memory. Cowan’s work also found that these four chunks can only be familiar or simple information (as opposed to four new complex concepts). Merrill advocates that learners should be presented with a chunk of the parts and then allowed to practice. The next chunk of parts should then be presented and learners should be allowed to practice this second chunk but it should also include items from the first chunk as this spaced retrieval builds deeper long term knowledge.

Practice / Application for part-whole relationships

Learners should be given practice opportunities to locate, and name or describe each part:

Given the location of a part identify its name.
Given the name of a part identify its location with respect to the whole.
Given the location of a part, recognise some information about the part.
Given information about a part identify its location with respect to the whole.

Learners should be given corrective feedback for both correct and incorrect responses, the parts should be shown in random order (to help prevent learners from memorising a sequence), location cues should be avoided and learners should have multiple opportunities to identify each part.

Part-whole relationships example: Regions of the brain

This example uses five instructional events:

A Presentation (Information-centred / Demonstration) teaching event. (1)
Four Practice / Application learning events. (2) (3) (4) (5)

Learn about the different regions of the brain and their functions.

Learn the names and functions of the different regions of the brain and what the consequences are if a region is damaged or injured: