ABSTRACT
Complex learning involves integrating knowledge, skills, and attitudes; coordinating qualitatively different *constituent skills*, and often transferring of what is learned in the school or training setting to daily life and work set tings. The current interest in complex learning is manifest in popular educa tional approaches that call themselves inquiry, guided discovery, project based, case method, problem based, design based, and competency based. Examples of theoretical design models promoting complex learning are 4Mat (McCarthy, 1996), cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989), collaborative problem solving (Nelson, 1999), constructiv ism and constructivist learning environments (Jonassen, 1999), instructional episodes (Andre, 1997), learning by doing (Schank, Berman, & MacPerson, 1999), multiple approaches to understanding (Gardner, 1999), star legacy (VanderBilt learning technology group: Schwartz, Lin, Brophy, & Bransford, 1999), and the four component instructional design model (Van Merriën boer, 1997). Though these approaches differ in many ways, what they have in common is their focus on learning tasks based on real life *authentic tasks* as the driving force for teaching and learning. The basic idea behind this focus is that such tasks help learners integrate knowledge, skills, and attitudes, stimu late them to learn to coordinate constituent skills, and facilitate *transfer* of what is learned to new problem situations (M. D. Merrill, 2002b; Van Merriënboer, 2007; Van Merriënboer & Kirschner, 2001).
