ABSTRACT
Organizing content comprises the basic sequence or structure for teaching a task or topic, somewhat like the skeleton of a body. Kinds of supporting content include information, understandings, skills, and attitudes, each of which requires different methods of instruction. The major parts of lower-level design include selecting and sequencing all the organizing and supporting content and determining what kind of learning each entails so that the most effective learner objectives, instruction, and assessment can be designed. Over the past 50 years as society has become ever more complex, tasks in general have fewer procedural elements and more heuristic elements, resulting in a distribution of tasks increasingly skewed to the heuristic side of the continuum. Linear procedures are ones that have a single sequence of steps that are always performed in a set order, and the output of one step is the input for the next step. It is rare for a task to be a linear procedure.
