Designing Training that Helps the Brain Learn and the Learner Perform

It’s been awhile since I tackled one of The Learning Circuits Blog Big Question of the Month – but this one is intriguing ” “Does the discussion of how the brain learns impact your e-learning design?”

I feel pretty confident answering yes, – and only partly because I have a boss who’s a huge fan of research-based instructional design. We literally spent half of our last company-wide meeting reviewing the basics from learning researchers like Ruth Clark, Robert Gagne, and Benjamin Bloom.

One of the criticisms I saw from some of the bloggers who called the brain-based instruction craze a lot of hooey was that the principles were just “common sense”. The problem with common sense is that some of what I see as common practice doesn’t necessarily make sense with what we know about how people learn. Here are the top three “common sense” practices I see that run completely counter to what we know about how people learn.

Interesting facts will help the learner better remember the information

Ruth Clark’s coherence principle is pretty clear that extraneous information detracts from learning. This extraneous information won’t drive performance, even if the learner does remember it. And the space it takes up in the learner’s brain might well be better used for performance-driving information.

Often, subject matter experts want to compound the damage by putting the interesting but irrelevant information right at the start of the training. The basic instructional design principle of primacy tells us that right up front is prime learning real estate – definitely not the place to put something you don’t really care if the learner remembers or not.

Pictures engage the learner

The multimedia principle (Ruth Clark again – we like her stuff quite a lot around BLP) says that pictures have to be relevant to be useful in learning. Sounds obvious enough – but how many powerpoint slides or e-learning pages have you seen with graphics that are clearly there to just make the page look better? Pretty is good – pretty and relevant is required for the instruction to be effective.

Practice is a nice-to-have, but can be skipped if you run out of time

While I very seldom hear clients talk about this one when designing instructor led training, we’ve all seen it happen. Instructors run out of time, or simply want to win points with their audience by getting done early, and the first thing to go is the exercises. We’ve all heard that practice makes perfect – and most of us have heard the nitpicky version, “perfect practice makes perfect”. Common sense, sure, but also often ignored in practice.

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