The order in which information and skills are introduced affects the difficulty students have in learning them.
Guidelines:
Teach pre skills for a strategy before teaching the strategy.
Teach easy skills before more difficult ones.
Separate the introduction of information or strategies that students are likely to confuse.
Research suggests that teaching students' explicit instructional strategies increases their performance in mathematics. Explicit instruction can be defined as "systematic, direct, engaging, and success oriented". Well-designed instructional strategies must apply to a range of different types of problems. Teachers should select the most generalizable, useful, and explicit strategies to teach their students-strategies that draw attention to the relationships among the mathematical skills and concepts being taught.
Instruction should be sequenced so that the requisite component skills of a strategy are taught before the entire strategy is introduced. Pre-skills are also known as component skills. To ensure students have mastered pre-skills, teachers should test students on these preskills.
Constructing or choosing appropriate problems to be used during teaching demonstrations and student practice.
Guidelines:
Only include problems that students can solve by using a strategy that has been explicitly taught.
Include not only examples of the currently introduced type (introductory examples) but also examples of previously introduced problem types that are similar (discrimination examples).
Providing sufficient practice for initial mastery and adequate review for retention is an essential aspect of instructional design.
Guidelines:
Teachers must provide massed practice on an individual skill until mastery is reached.
Teachers monitor their students carefully and frequently to determine if and when mastery has been achieved.