Tailoring Health Instruction to Motivate Learners in Electronic Learning Environments

Health educators are regularly challenged to design instruction that motivates an audience to learn and practice health maintenance and risk reduction skills. The challenge exists because information alone is seldom sufficient to change attitudes and behaviors. Some people do not see a need to change current attitudes and habits; others find the information to be contradictory to their belief system. In online or other electronic learning environments, where learner-educator interaction may be limited, the challenge may be even greater. There are, however, message design techniques to increase learner motivation. One of those is tailoring.

Tailoring is a message design technique that incorporates formally assessed learner characteristics into message design, thus making the message personally relevant. Relevant information is more likely to be thoughtfully processed, and thus, more successful in motivating a person to make a suggested behavior change. This is particularly true when the tailoring is based on selected behavior theory, a technique called behavioral construct tailoring. In this capacity, established behavioral construct theories are used to strategically form the structural content of a message.

This presentation will describe research into the use of health communications model to design and deliver online tailored lesson introductions as a means to increase learner motivation towards a selected health topic in an electronic learning environment. Additionally, attendees will use a risk assessment template to develop their own audience assessment tool as a starting point in the development of their own tailored health instruction message. Finally, there will be a discussion about suggested future research into tailored health instruction, particularly in regards to using different behavioral theories, collecting audience data, and tailoring of different components of instruction.