While medical technology, intervention, and treatment continue to advance, patients often find themselves involved in an increasingly complex healthcare system . Because of this, many patients lack access to the knowledge to facilitate successful navigation or participation in healthcare systems to their best advantage. Patient Ill education that provides experiential information has been shown to reduce anxiety levels and increase patient health outcomes and compliance with medical instructions or recommendations. Given the demonstrated effectiveness of experiential instruction in patient education, Model-Centered Instruction (MCI) has the potential to be an effective instructional design for patient education because it affords the learner experience with systems or models in the presence of instructional augmentation. While MCI design theory is well-documented, it has not been widely implemented and tested at the instructional product level.

Although civil engineers continually develop new ways to solve problems involving water, energy, infrastructure and environmental sustainability, these innovations can take years – or even decades – to reach developing countries. Computer-based instruction has the potential to dramatically decrease this lag time by improving engineering education in the developing world. This paper discusses the development of instructional simulations, based on the theory of model-centered instruction. These simulations can serve as self-paced learning modules, which can be accessed for free over the Internet. A pilot learning module was developed for the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on the topic of reservoir sedimentation. This pilot learning module is described in terms of widely-accepted instructional design principles. Preliminary assessment of the pilot module demonstrated that instructional simulations can effectively teach engineering principles within the context of real-world problems. Students found this type of learning to be both challenging and engaging.

Many researchers feel that teacher preparation programs are not doing enough to prepare teachers to effectively use technology. The result is a plethora of teachers who may know the basic functions of different programs, but who are unprepared to integrate these skills into their teaching. One method used by a few preservice programs, including BYU's, is the use of modeling sessions, otherwise referred to as live modeling. In these modeling sessions, the instructor models for the preservice teachers how a K-12 teacher could teach with technology, while the preservice teachers participate as if they were K-12 students. This thesis is a qualitative investigation of how this method of live modeling has impacted students, according to the perceptions of a sample of former students of the course. This project also has a practical focus of identifying strategies for improving modeling, and pitfalls that may indicate when modeling is not as effective. Overall, this study found that modeling was perceived by most students to be effective at teaching technology skills and ideas for integrating technology as teachers. However, there were some students who struggled to abstract principles from the modeling that could help them as teachers. In other words, they struggled to cognitively transfer the learning from the context of the modeling session to their own teaching contexts. In this research I identify five main contextual breakdowns that often occurred among students in the course. These were breakdowns, or differences, between the modeled context and the students' actual contexts that were sufficiently large enough to disrupt the students' abilities to cognitively transfer the learning. By adapting the live modeling method to more specifically address unique students' needs and contexts, then the cognitive transfer of learning should be easier and the method could be a strong tool for training preservice teachers to use technology in their own teaching.