us the instructional process, make content accessible to learners with different learning styles, and to facilitate skill mastery (Sherry, Billig, Jesse, & Watson-Acosta, 2001). It is the purpose of this brief report to identify the uses of instructional design in the K-12 environment with a focus on the integration of instructional technologies into this process. Because of the proliferation of these technologies, K-12 teachers are being increasingly challenged to integrate multimedia educational tools into their day-to-day teaching and instructional processes (Sologuk, Stammen, & Vetter, 2001).
Blanton (1998) believes that instructional design is particularly important in light of research on cognitive learning theory. Educators typically encounter a dilemma when they consider whether to design instruction to deal with cognitive processing weaknesses or to design it to capitalize on cognitive processing strengths. Cognitive scientists distinguish between declarative and procedural knowledge, with the former understood as knowledge about the world and its properties and the latter, knowledge about how to do things. As Blanton (1998) has pointed out, although commonalities exist to some extent, students use their own modes of cognitive processing to acquire,
...