Thursday, April 21, 2011

Building Expertise: Cognitive Methods for Training and Performance Improvment

Discussion by George Pullman

I've found this book tremendously interesting because it provides advice about how to teach based on research into cognition and memory. I wish I had more time to sew the pieces I've excerpted below into a coherent overview of the book because the effort would ensure deeper encoding, but the Kindle running summary approach will have to do for now once again.

And again, frustratingly, no page numbers. The quotations below highlight about three quarters of the book. You want to read the whole thing.

But before I get to that, I want to highlight an observation that the author makes near the end of the book: "minimize the need for the learner to make inferences". This assertion is akin to the usability book Don't Make Me Think. One might argue that by the time a student gets to university, their ability to draw inferences should be the only thing we are really interested in and the most reliable way to assess a students' knowledge and ability to think. If you are teaching a procedural activity, and memorizing the steps isn't going to be effective because they are complex and you have to know how each step effects the process, then drawing inferences for the learner will help them avoid pointless errors. But if what you want them to learn is how to think like a member of a discipline -- like a chemist or an anthropologist or an art historian -- then doesn't it make sense to set up learning experiences that require the learner to draw inferences? On the other hand, playing "guess what's on my mind" is a frustrating and useless activity and if you make people infer, you have no control over where they will go and you won't necessarily see the thought process that led to the conclusion, especially if the conclusion is out of sync.  Anyway,

  • Part of building expertise is to train the brain to “see” problems through the eyes of an expert; in other words, to build the ability to represent problems in ways that lead to effective solutions.  
  • Most modern scientific findings today are the result of research teams working collaboratively expertise is the product of mental models that develop over long periods of time, with the highest levels of expertise growing out of deliberate practice.   
  • Learners with little knowledge about the topic were greatly helped by graphics; whereas graphics did not improve learning of learners with relevant background.
  •  In spite of the popularity of individual differences known as learning styles, research points to prior experience as the most significant learner characteristic influencing learning practice opportunities. In contrast, learners with greater prior knowledge have more mental resources to draw upon during learning.
  •  To the extent that you can make tradeoffs in lesson design based on their psychological effects and can justify your decisions to others, you embrace evidence-based practice.
  • The primary goal of organizational training is to help learners build the best mental models to support job-relevant expertise.
  • Novices will be much more subject to cognitive load in working memory than will experts in their skill field, and therefore novices will require different instructional methods for success in learning  873    
  • Learners who have well-developed schemas have a more extensive basis for the integration of new content than learners lacking related schemas.
  • Motivation relies on of a set of beliefs—beliefs about yourself, about the learning goals and content, and about the outcomes from a learning event.
  • Help learners selectively attend to what is important by adding cues such as behavioral objectives and by avoiding distractions that cause learners to divide their attention
  • Many believe that the MTV and video game generation is accustomed to high-intensity multimedia and will profit from rich media. However, experiments with college-age learners in which background music, environmental sounds, or both music and sounds were added to a narrated multimedia lesson found that learning was 61 to 149 percent better in the absence of unnecessary audio.
  • By studying a worked example, the learner can build a mental model of how to solve that type of problem in a manner that requires less mental effort than directly solving the problem herself.
  • Research shows that when learners have contact with the instructor while doing individual work, their engagement rates increase by around 10 percent.
  • I have found that the common technique of pausing and asking: “Does anyone have a question?” is usually not productive. Instead, pause for a practice exercise or brief participant discussion that requires learners to apply new knowledge and skills. During the activity, the participants and instructor can verify understanding and learner questions will surface.
  • Brophy and Good (1986) recommend that: “Achievement is maximized when teachers not only actively present material, but structure it by…outlining the content and signaling transitions between lesson 
  • parts; calling attention to main ideas; summarizing subparts of the lesson as it proceeds” 
  • Problem-based learning is a type of collaborative learning in which a small group of five to seven learners begins their learning with a problem discussion. The lesson follows a structured process, including identifying potential solutions to or causes of the problem, defining learning issues, conducting individual research on the learning issues, and reconvening to resolve the problem. 
  • Those who had attempted to answer and justify responses to pre-questions learned the most. Even learners in that group who gave incorrect responses to the pre-questions showed better outcomes than those in the other two groups.
  • Research on discourse processing shows that people work harder to understand material when they feel they are in a conversation with a partner, rather than simply receiving information.
  • Learners love examples. In fact, they prefer them to explanations.
  • Many research studies conducted with all age groups over the past forty years provide consistent evidence that, under the right conditions, participants who study together learn more than those who study alone. This holds true for many different subject areas and a wide range of tasks completed by learners who work in small groups or in pairs (Cohen, 1994; Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 2007; Lou, Abrami, & d’Apollonia, 2001; Qin, Johnson, & Johnson, 1995; Springer, Stanne, & Donovan, 1999)
  • Wiley and Voss’s (1999) findings that individual learners assigned to write a pro-and-con argument learned more than learners asked to write either a narration or a summary 
  • Mayer and Wittrock (2006): “Creative thinking involves generating ideas that could be used to solve a problem, whereas critical thinking involves evaluating ideas that could be used to solve a problem” (p, 288, emphasis mine [Clark's])
  • Mayer and Wittrock (1996) conclude that “Modern attempts to find mind-improving subject matter such as Head Start in preschool or LOGO have not been more successful than historical attempts to use Latin to improve minds. A consistent theme is that a short course of study in one subject-matter area does not have enduring effects on solving radically different problems in other subject matter domains” (p. 52)
  • ECONOMIC COMPETITIVENESS increasingly relies on adaptive expertise—expertise that grows from flexible and creative thinking skills problem-centered design as an instructional strategy in which tasks or problems relevant to the instructional objective are the context for learning presents content in a relevant context.  
  • The best feedback is aligned to productive task goals and is informative as well as corrective include a self-assessment diagnostic test they can use to define their qualifications for your class