It nicely fits current trends in education: a focus on the development of complex skills or professional competencies, increasing transfer of what is learned in school to new situations, including the workplace, and the development of skills that are important for lifelong learning.

The 4C/ID model has been extensively described in scientific articles (e.g., van Merriënboer, Clark, & de Croock, 2002; Vandewaetere, Manhaeve, Aertgeerts, Clarebout, van Merriënboer, & Roex, 2015) and two books in the English language: Training Complex Cognitive Skills (van Merriënboer, 1997) and Ten Steps to Complex Learning (van Merriënboer, Kirschner & Frèrejean, 2024).

Component 1: Learning Tasks

Learning tasks are treated as the backbone of an educational program (see the large green circles in the figure). They can be cases, projects, professional tasks, problems or assignments that learners work on. They will perform these tasks in a simulated task environment and/or a real-life task environment (e.g., the workplace). A simulated task environment can have a very low fidelity, for example, when a case is presented on paper (“suppose you are a doctor and a patient is coming into our room….”) or when a role play is performed in the classroom, but it can also have a very high fidelity, like a high-fidelity simulator of an aircraft for training pilots or an emergency room for training trauma care teams.

Component 2: Supportive Information

Learning tasks typically make an appeal on both non-routine and routine skills, which might be performed simultaneously. Supportive information (indicated by the blue L-shaped forms in the figure) helps students perform the non-routine aspects of learning tasks, which require problem solving, reasoning and/or decision making. Teachers often call this information ‘the theory’ because it is typically presented in study books, lectures, and online resources. It describes how the task domain is organized and how problems in the domain can be approached systematically (i.e., how the actions of the task performer are organized in the domain).

Component 3: Procedural Information

Procedural information (in the figure, the yellow beam with arrows pointing upwards to the learning tasks) helps students perform the routine aspects of learning tasks, that is, aspects that are always performed in the same fashion. Procedural information is also called just-in-time information because it is best provided during the performance of particular learning tasks. It typically has the form of ‘how-to’ or ‘step-by-step’ instructions given to the learner by a teacher or user guide, telling how to perform the routine aspects of the task while doing it. The advantage of a teacher over a user guide is that the teacher can act as an ‘assistant looking over your shoulder’ and give instructions and corrective feedback on precisely the moment it is needed by the learner for correctly performing the task. Procedural information for a particular routine aspect is preferably presented to the learner the first time he or she must perform this aspect as part of a learning task. For subsequent tasks, the presentation of procedural information gradually fades because the need for it diminishes as the learner slowly masters the routine.

Component 4: Part-task Practice

Learning tasks make an appeal on both non-routine and routine aspects of a complex skill or professional competency; as a rule, they provide enough practice for learning the routine aspects. Part-task practice of routine aspects (the small yellow circles in the figure) is only needed when a very high level of automaticity of routine aspects is needed, and when the learning tasks do not provide the required amount of practice. Familiar examples of part-task practice are practicing the multiplication tables of 1 to 10 in primary school (in addition to whole arithmetic tasks such as paying in a shop or measuring the area of a floor), practicing the musical scales when playing an instrument (in addition to whole tasks such as playing musical pieces), or practicing physical examination skills in a medical program (in addition to whole tasks such as intake of patients).