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Saturday, October 14, 2017

Retrieval Practice - The Key to Becoming a Certified Professional That Knows His or Her Stuff


Starting in 2014, I decided to up my career game by obtaining several new certifications to go with my lonely Project Management Professional certification. I obtained my PMP back in 2003 after three months of study (not to mention three years of project management experience). I bought some PMP exam preparation books and diligently worked through the books.

It was during my PMP studying that I stumbled upon a great technique to help me retain the knowledge. I created flash cards - the manual way. I bought a pack of index cards and put the key terms and concepts on the cards. I would then run through the cards whenever I had some free time. I would score the cards by how easily I could answer the question. I would gradually retire the easier questions and work with the cards I didn't know so well. At certain points, I would practice the easy card just to make sure I didn't forget the terms and concepts.

This is known as retrieval practice which is simply quizzing yourself at regular intervals. The best way to do this is through flashcards. The advanced technique is to use spaced intervals to organize the flashcards. This is called the Leitner technique and is easy to implement.



When I started on my second series of certifications, I still used flashcards. The difference is that I used online study card apps. My favorite is Quizlet because it can create flashcards but can also test you through games, quizzes, and easily share your flashcards with others.



The coolest new feature is Quizlet Learn which uses adaptive learning to supercharge the spaced retrieval. However, no matter how high-tech the flashcard, the underlying learning concept of retrieval practice is still a great way to earn those certifications - and to make sure you don't lose that knowledge after the certification exam.


Friday, September 29, 2017

Retrieval Practice and Deep Smarts

A book that has profoundly influenced my view of training is Deep Smarts by Swap and Leonard (2005). According to Swap and Leonard, knowledge that we develop on the job follows a bell curve. In the middle of the curve are the knowledge and skills we use most frequently. Toward the ends of the curve are knowledge and skills we use less frequently because, the further we move toward the tails of the curve, the rarer are the work situations. According to Swap and Leonard (2005), it takes around 10 to 25 years for a person to fully gain the knowledge and skills of their job. For example, it may take 10 years for an electrical power line worker to fully learn the job because some work situations may only occur once in the 10 years.






To help speed up the process of learning and knowledge transfer, Swap and Leonard (2005) advocate the following model of training:


When you compare the diagram to the quote from Make it Stick (2014), you can see the similarities.

"Retrieval practice that you perform at different times and in different contexts and that interleaves different learning material has the benefit of linking new associations to the material. This process builds interconnected networks of knowledge that bolster and support mastery of your field. It also multiplies the cues of retrieving and knowledge, increasing the versatility with which you can later apply it."


The "Learning by Doing" section of the diagram describes the four practices of "Guided Experience." These four practices rely on using retrieval practice to help learners develop cues for different work situations. The key is that the retrieval practice is tied to experiences that are guided. Swap and Leonard (2005) discuss a training simulation that helps the electrical power line worker acquire knowledge and skills in two years when undirected, learning-on-the-job would have taken ten years.

Now, Leonard and Swap (2005) do not discuss the interleaving process but the other concept of building interconnected networks of knowledge is a major part of Guided Experience. Leonard and Swap (2005) also describe how the four Guided Experience practices helps the student build versatility by having the student apply knowledge to novel situations and adapting the knowledge as needed.

Thus, I agree with the instructor's assertion that the quote from Make it Stick (2014) is apt summary of the book and a reinforcement of a key method in knowledge transfer and training.

References

Brown, P.C., Roediger III, H.L., & McDaniel, M.A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. Belknap Press.
Leonard, D., & Swap, W.C. (2005). Deep smarts: How to cultivate and transfer enduring business wisdom. Harvard Business Review Press.

Sunday, September 24, 2017

Microlearning and Desirable Difficulties

 The most interesting concept of Dr. Bjork's talk is the idea of desirable difficulties. As a trainer and instructional designer, I use Kirkpatrick's Four Levels of Evaluation to determine the effectiveness of my courses. For those who are not familiar with Kirkpatrick's model, the four levels can be summarized this way:

First Level - did the learner like the course?
Second Level - did the learner learn from the course?
Third Level - did the learner's behavior change as a result of the course?
Fourth Level - did the organization as a whole benefit from the learner(s) taking the course?

Learners like courses that provide the immediate gratification of learning. That is, learners want to learn something easily and be able to quickly apply the learning. I have to admit that I also like courses where I can immediately apply concepts and tools to my work. Being able to immediately apply training does give the illusion of having learned something. However, without reinforcement, learning quickly fades.

For example, in preparing for the certification as a Senior Professional in Human Resources, I memorized a large list of landmark cases in employee relations. I did the usual study practice of reading the case summaries over and over. That was sufficient for the certification exam but, two years later, I have forgotten most of the list. I did not have the opportunity to practice the cases in real situations nor did I use desirable difficulty techniques to learn the employee relations cases. I had the illusion of learning thanks to massed studying but no long-term real learning.

This is the situation I am seeing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Supervisor Certification Program (SCP). We put supervisors through 24 hours of training in various supervision topics. The courses are mostly lecture with some interaction and role-playing. The current design does not have desirable difficulties. There is a capstone project and refresher training but, according to employee engagement surveys, we could do a much better job training supervisors.

This is why I advocate introducing microlearning into the program. Both before and after the SCP courses. The idea is to use desirable difficulties to prime the students for SCP learning and to reinforce the SCP learning. We accomplish this by presenting short video or podcast scenarios that test the supervisors on several supervisory scenarios that combine several supervisory topics together.
I see this use of microlearning as training the supervisors like the students were trained in throwing into targets that were three feet away. As Dr. Bjork explained, students that were trained on varying distances to the targets did better than students who trained solely on the three-foot target distance. I want to construct the SCP microlearnings in a similar way.

Thursday, September 21, 2017

BBS: The Online Learning Networks of the 80s

Back in the days of Reagan, MTV, and New Coke, I was heavily involved in the first online learning networks. I spent a weekend typing five pages of machine code into my Commodore 64 to create a bulletin board system (BBS). Page after page of a computer program that looked like this:

 

On a computer that I hooked up to a color TV and had a cassette tape drive as its external memory.


Mr. Will Richardson's TEDxNYED talk on social online learning networks was nothing new to me because I have been using these networks since I was thirteen. Granted, the networks were not as accessible as they are today. I was lucky enough to grow up with friends who were into computers and ham radio (by the way, I'm KC3FSN if any other hams want to CQ me). We would spend hours learning physics, math, and other subjects outside of school because we were having fun! Like Mr. Richardson's daughter, we didn't know we weren't ready for higher math and sophisticated electronics. We just learned things because we wanted to do cool stuff like bounce radio signals off meteorites.

I remember being in a high school geometry class and being told to put my book away because we were learning about right triangles today. The book that I was reading? Calculus for the Millions.

As Mr. Richardson points out, teaching to the test is killing the thirst for learning by students and the love of teaching from our educators. As he points out, we have an educational system that no longer applies to today's world. I see that in my training as I watch yet another trainer kills by PowerPoint. 

At work, I talk a lot about microlearning, content curation, cafeteria-style learning, and personalized learning environments. However, this seems like old wine in new bottles because this all reminds me of my early youth where we had a problem we wanted to solve or an innovation to try. We would go to the local library or jump on the BBSes or jump on the ham radio rig and ask our geeky peers how to do something.  Failing was part of the learning experience and was nothing to be feared. 

That is the problem with teaching to the test. It is all about not failing and to determine the one correct answer to a question posed by a faceless authority. Where is the satisfaction of achievement in that? Where is the satisfaction of learning?

For a trip back to the 80s, here is how we used to access Google . . . 

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Training Myths and Facts - Learning Styles

(Attribution: Wikipedia Commons)

I recently gave a train-the-trainer course to a group of subject matter experts (SME). Things were going well until I brought up a section on "learning styles." Learning styles are the classic trio of ways people like to learn: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. According to learning style theory, you need to determine how each student prefers to learn and cater your lesson to that learning.

For example, visual learners like diagrams, pictures, and charts to help them understand concepts. Auditory learners prefer listening to explanations while kinesthetic listeners need to move around to learn. The students were familiar with the concept of learning styles and several told me of their preferred learning style. The students talked about how other trainers were good at accommodating the different learning styles. This is when I dropped the "truth bomb."

Despite years of research, there is no evidence for learning styles. This short video gives the arguments against learning styles:


So, why do many trainers and educators continue to believe in learning styles? According to Daniel T. Willingham, there are three reasons why the learning styles belief persists:

"First, I think by this point it’s achieved the status of one of those ideas that “They” have figured out. People believe it for the same reason I believe atomic theory. I’ve never seen the scientific papers supporting it (and wouldn’t understand them if I had), but everyone believes the theory and my teachers taught it to me, so why would I doubt that it’s right?
Second, I think learning styles theory is widely accepted because the idea is so appealing. It would be so nice if it were true. It predicts that a struggling student would find much of school work easier if we made a relatively minor change to lesson plans—make sure the auditory learners are listening, the visual learners are watching, and so on.
Third, something quite close to the theory is not only right, it’s obvious. The style distinctions (visual versus auditory; verbal versus visual) often correspond to real differences in ability. Some people are better with words, some with space, and so on. The (incorrect) twist that learning styles theory adds is to suggest that everyone can reach the same cognitive goal via these different abilities; that if I’m good with space but bad with words (or better, if I prefer space to words), you can rearrange a verbal task so that it plays to my spatial strength."
What other training and learning myths have you encountered in your work as a learning and development professional?