Research on instructional design, educational technology, and problem solving tends to emphasize instructional manipulations at the expense of a careful consideration of what learners need to know. The effort to identify what learners need to know is often slow and painful, but it is crucial. The process involves one or more domain experts and someone to extract the information from those experts. If this knowledge elicitation is not done, then materials and conclusions based on designers’ and researchers’ efforts and intuitions might tell us little about how to convey the “right” information for the domain. I will present work that consistently demonstrates the importance of identifying what learners need to know before considering how to convey it. These projects have been in domains ranging from physics to ballet to probability and have involved presentations via paper and pencil to multimedia training environments.
