ID Meets IT Part 8: STAR Leagcy

If Anchored Instruction (AI) and PSI were to meet at college during their student teaching year, fall in love and have a brief yet passionate engagement, wed shortly after at the Alumni Chapel on campus and later give birth to a bouncing baby girl, that child would be named STAR Legacy. Her father, AI, has passed down to her his love of expertise, tackling real-world problems, and spinning a good yarn. Her mother, on the other hand, shares her independence, her desire for structure, and a belief that action speaks louder than words.


Family metaphors aside, the STAR (Software Technology for Action and Reflection) Legacy model presents a middle ground between between two instructional models at opposite ends of the design continuum. As with Anchored Instruction, STAR shares the instructional philosophy that learning should be contextualized within "meaningful, if not authentic, tasks". Content is often presented by "experts" in the field through video or audio recordings, and within an evolving narrative that follows a set of individuals as the work their way through the "challenge" they encountered. As with the PSI, STAR follows a linear, though cyclical, format and learners are consciously aware of where exactly they are in the learning process.  The figure below shows the components of the STAR process.

As was intended with its creation, the STAR "shell" was designed to be a flexible format with room for adaption to meet the needs of the teachers and students within their local context and implementation can vary. For instance, STAR as laid out by Schwatz incorporates the use of collaborative learning and provides perspectives and resources for completing tasks primarily outside of the STAR shell similar to PBL. STAR as implemented through modules on Vanderbilt's Iris Center website, however, follows take a PSI model approach with students working through modules independently, and as in AI, resources for solving problems are embedded primarily within the module, at least from those that I sampled. Regardless of the implementation, STAR still has it's roots in problem-based learning with the unique contribution of a legacy component, the creation of projects or products by students to be left behind for the next generation of learners.

According to Schwartz, the purpose of this approach is to:

teach a deep understanding of disciplines-while simultaneously fostering the skills of problem solving, collaboration. and communication-through the use of problem-based learning followed by more open-ended project-based learning.

As mentioned in a previous post, "aside from from the inquiry and problem-solving skills gained by placing an emphasis on learning as a process, students of PBL have also demonstrated deeper understanding and retention of content, increased motivation and teamwork skills." I've also mentioned in a blog posting on AI the potential for increased motivation resulting from immersing students in a complex problem that allows them to creatively solve more open-ended problems, while also fostering critical skills that are given a lot of lip service in education, but take a back seat to knowledge and skills that are easily measured by standardized tests.

While I have little experience with the STAR model specifically, the components of the model align almost directly with Gagne's nine instructional events and these I have considerable experience with as an educator. In fact, most of the models in this series incorporate these events in some fashion and differ primarily in how they present the content (event 4), provide "learning guidance (event 5), and elicit performance (event 6). Although I have little experience with this approach, I have used a mathematics program that frequently makes use of problem-based learning. In fact, two years ago I served on the textbook adoption committee for math and was able to help sway the committee in adopting a program called NSF funded program called Investigations that frequently makes use of the approaches discussed in the past few posts. A number of units in this series are prolonged "investigations" that are anchored to a particular situation or problem. One unit in particular was an extended study of the differences in heights between 1st and 4th graders which the students found especially engaging.

I've already mentioned several drawbacks to these contextualized approaches in previous posts, so in this post I want explore the difficulties we encountered with our first year of implementation of Investigations. As with any new program, Investigations was received with skepticism by many, and even disdain by a few.  As dramatically different is the PSI model from Anchored Instruction or Problem-Based Learning, so was the difference between Investigations and our previous Houghton Mifflin math text. From a teacher standpoint, it was a giant shift in how instruction was delivered. The older series was a teacher-centered approach with each lesson throughout the entire text following the exact same format of sample problem, teacher modeling of correct method for solving the problem, guided practice and then individual practice. Teachers had grown comfortable and some even successful with this approach, so implementing an approach that focused on group work, student solutions and problem solving over computational fluency was a difficult change. If teachers had difficulty adapting, it's not surprising that students did as well. My 4th grade students that came to me had very little experience working cooperatively and learning from classmates, and previous years of "correct" solutions and standard algorithms led to a sort of intellectual dependency on the teacher making creative problem solving and independent thinking very difficult for students. While these difficulties are confined to very specific setting and situation, I would imagine that implementing a problem-based approach like STAR at any level would pose similar problems for teachers and students.

In previous posts I've discussed ways in which technology can enhance these older models and bring them into the digital fold.  Returning to the analogy from the beginning, if PSI and AI are the "digital immigrants" of instructional technology family, then the STAR model is a "digital native" having been conceived and brought up in a digital world.  As demonstrated in the STAR modules from Vanderbilt, this model has been adapted to utilize the multimedia potential of the online environment. Each model is rich with text, image, audio, and video content, is easily navigable with links, and includes a wealth of material that would be nearly unmanageable in a physical format. But STAR, at least as presented at the Iris Center, is clearly starting to show her age. STAR Legacy is static and isolated and represents the height of instructional technology circa 1999. What it needs to bring about the full conception of the model as presented by Schwartz is an infusion of social media and web 2.0 tools for creation, communication, and collaboration. While re-imagining STAR in light of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wordpress, Zynga and the like is beyond the scope of this post, its not difficult to envision STAR as part of a dynamic network of online learners working together to share perspectives, collaborate on solutions, and create legacies of their learning for next set of learners.


Schwartz, D., Lin, X., Brophy, S., & Bransford, J. D. (1999). Toward the development of flexibly adaptive instructional designs. In C. M. Reigeluth (Ed.), Instructional design theories and models (2nd ed., pp. 183-214). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.