The major purpose of instructional science is to prescribe optimal methods to bring about desired learning, and the purposes of this paper are twofold: (1) to encourage individuals in the discipline to think in terms of contributing to a collegial, or even competitive, building of a common knowledge base in instructional science, and (2) to briefly describe Component Display Theory, Elaboration Theory, and John Keller's work in motivation as three recent attempts to build such a base. In all three models, the instruction begins with a special kind of overview which is derived on the basis of a single kind of knowledge structure and epitomizes that knowledge structure rather than summarizing the course content. A 22-item reference list is provided. (RP)