Proposal
In-depth Analysis
Research Plan
Goal and Objective
Interview/
Survey
Analysis
Task:
• What's the goal and objective?
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• Which tasks and skills should be taught?
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• How to prioritize objectives?
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• What makes it hard to learn?
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• What kind of interaction should be added? (sound/animation/video/game…)
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• What is the learning environment?
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Needs:
• How is an individual actually performing?​
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• What is their optimal performance?
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• What solutions are possible?
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• What are learners’ feelings about the dog’s body language?
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• What are the performance gap and different levels of performance gap?
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• How have they been getting training if any? What their experience was and why?
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• What's the cause the problem?
Learner:
• What might get them excited about the content?
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• What’s the motivation of learners?
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• What are learners’ learning preferences and prior knowledge?
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Needs analysis
Scenario
Learner Survey
Dog-trainer interview
"Why do you think learning dog body language is important"
To conduct needs analysis, we followed the Rossett (1995)’s approach:
According to our survey and interviews:
Understanding dog body language can help owners understand dog's feelings to deepen the relationship
Learning dog body language helps the owner understand the dog's needs to prevent the behavioral problem
Learning dog body language helps the owner detect health problem
Gap Analysis
OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE:
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Dog owners can identify dogs’ happy, confident, comfortable faces and distressed, scared, insecure faces and corresponding bodies.
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Dog owners can identify dogs’ meta-signals (Play Bows, Bouncy Movements, Play Face).
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When people check their dog's status through the dog's body language within context, dog owners need to think about the whole dog's body, their posture and the way they stand as a whole.
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After correctly recognizing the dog's body language, the dog owner will then make the right response.
ACTUAL PERFORMANCE:
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Sometimes People ignore subtle signals.
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When people hug a dog, sometimes the dog just look away from which means the dog does not like it (but many people ignore it)
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Some teasing dog videos are very funny, but actually, dogs are very stressed. The dog will let the person know they are not comfortable with this with very subtle signs and those were ignored
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Dog showing teeth are telling people to back off, but dog owners sometimes ignore this signal
2. There are some dog owners who misinterpret dog's signal
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Tail: A wagging tail doesn't always mean the dog is happy. It's plenty of times when a dog is very scared.
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Panting: Panting not just means dogs are smiling or they are hot, but the tighter the lip, the more stressed they are.
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Rolling over: When a dog is rolling over and showing their belly, it more means a please for them to stop doing something.
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Growl: It is a form of communication, a precursor to having to escalate behavior that growl wasn’t listened to.
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Belly: People always think it is a great time to rub dogs’ belly if dogs are rolling down their backs. But a lot of dogs are not meant for that, people need to look at the whole body first.
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Licking: One misinterpretation a lot of people think is that their dog is giving kisses, but you can often see from the rest of the body language that the dog is leaning away or looking away, which means they are trying to increase the distance.
Feelings
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Based on our survey questions, over 50% of respondents strongly agree on the advantages of understanding dog body language.
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And about 67% of respondents strongly agree that understanding dog body language can better help notice common stressors and behaviors in other dogs while keeping ourselves and dogs in a safe situation.
Causes
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Online information could be misinformation.
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People don't realize the importance of learning a dog language.
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People don’t spend the time to understand. They are overwhelmed by the dog’s cuteness. It's not always about touching the dog when it does good.
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People don’t have the patience.
Following Morrison et al. (2006)’s approach, we interviewed four experienced dog trainers as our subject matter experts (SMEs) and referred to learning resources recommended by them, then we conducted topic analysis, procedural analysis and accordingly analyzed how learners can successfully meet the instructional goal.
Task Analysis
How to be competent?
Right Info
To debunk misconceptions
To debunk misconceptions
To debunk misconceptions
Attitude
be patient and pay more attention to dogs‘ attempts of communication.
Practice
Always look at the whole body.
Everything is contextual.
Every dog is an individual.
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The components of the instruction
Learning Outcomes: Understand dogs' signals to prevent dogs' behavioral problems and health problems.
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The declarative knowledge of whole body language and its corresponding emotional state:
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Learners can describe what feelings dogs may have based on visual signs of each part of the body including eyes, mouth, ears and tail, posture and sound.
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Learners can differentiate dogs’ feelings by looking at other parts of the body.
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The procedural knowledge of how to prevent behavioral and health problems:
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Learners can identify dogs’ feelings based on whole body language within a certain context.
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Learners can analyze the root cause of emotional states and behavioral problems.
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Learners can respond to dogs’ feelings to make sure they are comfortable.
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The conditional knowledge of how to appropriately prevent the dog’s behavioral and health problem in different scenarios:
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Learners can recognize whether dogs give their body consent when they are petted or hugged by people.
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Learners can bring back dogs’ focus when they react aggressively towards a dog on a leash.
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A learning environment where learners have chances to observe and interact with their own dog meanwhile effective and engaging instruction is provided.
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Learners’ own metacognition regulates them to be responsible caregivers.
Procedural Workflow
of preventing behavioral problems of dogs by looking at their body language
LEARNER Analysis
As we define the possible reason for dog owners to ignore and misinterpret the dog body language, it is essential that we can understand our target audiences’ general characteristics, prior knowledge and their preferences on learning methods. What is their motivation? To what extent do they already know about dog body language? What kind of instruction is attractive to them? These are questions that we need to keep in mind during analysis. Thus, we decided to refer to the Smaldino, Lowther, and Russell(2012) approach for better understanding our target audiences’ knowledge gap and learning preferences.
Learner Characteristics/Demographics
Who is our intended audience?
Dog owners in the US, classified as young adulthood and middle age populations are our intended audiences for our learning intervention. Our survey showed over 70% of people who have at least one dog, which aligns with the data we found from Statista where over 50% of people in the US have at least one dog.
We narrow down our demographic to the young and middle age group because our instruction may involve interactive media on the web, and our research need analysis clearly showed that dog owners in young and middle age have less time or lose patience quickly.
What is it about the topic that motivates the learners?
Based on the work of Brown and Green(2015), we identify our audience as “willing volunteers” where they participate in the instruction with their own purpose and interest. We discovered in our survey of dog owners that a large majority of respondents have an intrinsic motivation in learning dog body languages because they have strong incentives to understand dogs’ feeling better when they need help, bond the relationship with their four-legs friends, and prevent their dogs from urgent health or dangerous issues.
Learners' Prior Knowledge
Their Knowledge Gap
Interestingly, in choosing the priority of signs, we discovered in our survey of dog owners that a majority of respondents think tail wagging, postures and ears are three most important signs to understand dog behaviors first.
However, when we ask our learners what challenges they encounter while dealing with their dogs, only 4.8% of those surveyed said that they have problems with the confusion of dogs’ postures.
In contrast, dogs’ bad behaviors like barking, scratching and unexpected health situations are the biggest problems for our learners.
This finding is important for us to be aware that our learners pay less attention to dog body languages and have the neglect of dogs’ subtle signals.
Many dog owners may believe they have a strong understanding of their dog body language, however, all of our SMEs pointed out the problem of misinterpretation and mentioned most dog owners do not know a lot about body language besides the very obvious things. Both our SMEs, Hayley and Sara mentioned that most dog owners consider Growl as a bad thing while it is a precursor to having escalate behavior.
Learning Styles
Learning Preferences
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Based on our survey, we found that the majority of our learners have learned to communicate with their dogs by watching videos, slowly observing, and interactive media.
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And the data aligns with their preferences to learn dog body language through videos like Youtube or TikTok platform, and interactive media.
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Thus, we could tell it may be helpful for our design phases to cover these ways in order to achieve a more engaged learning experience.
Learner Personas
Goal and objectives
Goal:
After learning Dog Body Language, learners will be able to understand signals sent from their puppy by reading the dog’s body language.
Objectives
Behavioral problems:
Learners will be able to prevent dogs’ behavioral problems by reading the dog’s body language.
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Emotional states: Learners are able to identify dogs’ possible emotional states by looking at their whole body. (Fear, Anger, Affection/Love, Suspicion/ Shyness, Stress, Joy, Disgust, Contentment, Distress, Excitement, Sad, Physical Discomfort)
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Learners will be familiar with a range of dogs’ emotional states such as fear, anger, happiness, excitement, etc.
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Learners will be able to comprehend dogs’ emotional states by reading whole body language such as tail, eyes, posture, ears, etc. based on the context.
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Learners will be able to identify the root cause of dogs’ behavioral problems.
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Through its vocal language, such as growling, yelling, wheezing, and continuous slow barking, the dog's behavioral state is determined.
Health problem
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Learners will be able to Identify whether the dog is healthy or not by external state, such as mood (depressed, inactive, etc.) and behavior.
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Through learning the dog's body language, learners will be able to determine the dog's abnormal reaction, so as to avoid health problems.
Design Implications
The majority of our learners prefer to learn dog body language through videos and interactive media, so this could be a way in our design process to motivate our learners.
We should consider our priority decisions of tasks about how to teach step by step while highlighting the importance of subtle signs and looking at the whole body.
​One of our SMEs mentioned a website with similar goals as our project and pointed out the weakness of too much information to focus, so we need to minimize the cognitive load to ensure our contents match with our goals.
Reflection
YUhan
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Both big-picture and detail-oriented thinking is essential for the research and design process. The primary and secondary research through surveys, interviews with our SMEs, and online resources definitely helped us to generate ideas and narrow down our focus.
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From going through the analysis process, those abstract learning theories become practical for me while I have learned how to apply different learning theories and approaches into real-life problems.
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Weekly discussion for milestones, and clear division of work allow us to brainstorm ideas, keep on the track, and successfully collect data from interviews with four SMEs.
Kemeng
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Through interview and survey, I recognized the importance of learning dog body language, as well as the benefits of learning dog body language. My aha moment was when dog trainers talks about learning dog body language can't just look at one part, but the whole body, which gives a new direction to our course design objective.
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Each team member played a different role, and Yi Lu explained a lot of instructional design methods and models to us, which made our preliminary analysis more credible.
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Interviews with professional dog trainers and visits to their recommended websites were very helpful for our project
Yi Lu
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I feel like we can involve SMEs earlier in the analysis phase and do more secondary research before drafting survey and interview questions. I suppose that if we do interviews with SMEs first to recognize the pain points learners may have during the learning, then further draft survey questions, our data could be more targeted and granular. After all, SMEs are very familiar with learners’ learning paths. They know learners more than learners themselves.
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I think our team is pretty self-initiated. Though we have different levels of prior knowledge in different areas, we are willing to support each other and share the responsibilities. I think properly giving feedback and communicating our thoughts are important. For example, we can say "is it possible to…?" when we have different opinions.
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I think it is crucial to do a lot of primary and secondary research to understand the context and problem statement. Then dive into interviews and surveys to confirm or debunk our assumptions, organize information, and analyze the needs, tasks, and learners.
Tianyu yang
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Through research and interviews with dog trainers, I have come to appreciate the importance of dog body language. It not only allows me to understand dogs better, but also allows us to better communicate with dogs and become true partners of people.
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At the same time, in such group activities, group members conduct research and study together, and rationally allocate each person's field, which makes our research and analysis more convincing.
Referneces
Brown, A.H., & Green, T.D. (2015). The Essentials of Instructional Design: Connecting Fundamental Principles with Process and Practice, Third Edition (3rd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315757438
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Emma Bedford, and Feb 15. “Number of Pet Owning Households in the United States 2021/22.” Statista, 15 Feb. 2022, https://www.statista.com/statistics/198095/pets-in-the-united-states-by-type-in-2008/.
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Morrison, G. R., Ross, S. M., & Kemp, J. E. (2006) Designing effective instruction (4th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
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Rossett, A. (1995). Needs assessment. In G. Anglin (Ed.), Instructional technology: Past, present, and future (2nd ed.) (pp. 183–196). Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited.
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Smaldino, S., Lowther, D. L., & Russell, J. D. (2012). Instructional technology and media for learning (10th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
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