Learning, Remembering, Believing Enhancing Human Performance (1994) / Chapter Skim
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Epilogue
Epilogue
Pages 295-306
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From page 295... ...
What we have encountered repeatedly during such site visits is most curious: an openness to changes that might improve individual or team performance coupled with institutional and organizational reasons why those changes cannot be implemented. We have gotten this message to a greater or lesser extent from people in a wide range of military, commercial, governmental, and educational settings.
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From page 296... ...
In part, the low priority assigned to training is based on financial considerations that are intrinsic to the nature of training: however fruitful training programs might be from a cost-benefit standpoint the costs are immediate and the benefits are long term. Whenever the short-term bottom line is the primary concern of individuals responsible for management decisions, allocating resources to create or upgrade training or retraining programs will not be an appealing strategy.
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From page 297... ...
At the Nuclear Training Center in Connecticut, for example, the single consideration that is probably most influential in determining the content of training programs is the anticipated nature of upcoming certification testing by examiners from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The way fear of lawsuits can influence the allocation of training resources is illustrated by an example cited by training personnel at the Los Angeles Police Academy.
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From page 298... ...
To the extent that an overemphasis on innate ability as a determinant of performance is a societal belief, it can function as a self-fulfilling prophecy: an early bad experience or poor performance in a mathematics course, for example-can lead a person to think that he or she has no potential in that domain, which then, in turn, influences the path that the person follows. People avoid educational or job contexts that might give them the experience and training to succeed in domains where they have categorized themselves as without talent; conversely, they seek out contexts and roles that exercise talents they think they might have, which then fosters the development of those abilities.
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From page 299... ...
Trainees who perform well under artificially easy training conditions can gain a false confidence in the extent to which critical knowledge and skills have actually been acquired. Introducing certain types of difficulty during training is "desirable," therefore, not only to enhance the learning process but also to educate the learner's subjective experience that is, to provide real feedback to the learner as to the level of knowledge or skill that has, or has not, been achieved.
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From page 300... ...
regiment in a series of tank and infantry battles. The OPFOR, a highly trained and practiced regiment stationed at the Training Center, is nearly unbeatable on its home turf-1,000 square miles of harsh, uninhabited desert and mountains.
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From page 301... ...
Examples abound of trainees who appeared to perform perfectly at the end of training but who could not perform adequately months later in the posttraining environment, especially if the posttraining conditions differed from those of the training situation. (The fact that medical students, at the time of graduation, could remember only about 10 percent of the basic-science material they had presumably mastered during the first 2 years of medical school was one of the factors that led Harvard Medical School to move away from the traditional model of medical school education.)
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From page 302... ...
Such ratings, frequently referred to as "happy sheets" or "smile sheets," are subject to the illusions of comprehension and competence noted above, illusions that may well be fostered by the types of manipulations that enhance performance during training, but fail to support posttraining performance. And the types of desirable difficulties that enhance learning, in part by exercising those processes likely to be demanded in the posttraining environment, are unlikely to be well received by trainees, almost by the very nature of such manipulations.
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From page 303... ...
One needs also to work toward mastering the craft of instruction, which is a multifaceted and life-long process. To be most effective, an instructor needs to stay abreast of advances in high technology tools for training such as computer-assisted devices of one kind or another, needs to stay current with respect to research findings that have significant implications for training methodologies, and needs to explore systematically the relative effectiveness of alternative technologies and techniques in the particular training context.
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From page 304... ...
Expertise in a given domain hardly disqualifies one as a teacher, of course, but experts may not only lack experience and knowledge of those teaching principles that transcend particular domains, but may also lack an understanding of their own skill or be unable to adopt the perspective of a novice. A high level of expertise in golf, or writing computer code, or preparing tax forms, for example, is no guarantee that one can effectively teach those skills.
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From page 305... ...
It seems plausible that the writers of such manuals have frequently been selected primarily on the basis of their intimate knowledge of a given product an engineer or computer technician, perhaps, who played a significant role in designing or refining that product- without regard to their skills, or lack thereof, as a writer or instructor or their skill in adopting the perspective of a learner. Administrative Structures Another contributor to nonoptimal training is organizational structures that act to isolate instructors.
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From page 306... ...
Administrators, who possess the power and, unfortunately, often the inclination to stop innovation, also frequently possess the power to foster and implement desirable changes. CONCLUDING COMMENTS Having focused on certain impediments to effective training, and having attempted to illustrate those impediments, we have perhaps painted an excessively gloomy picture of what the committee encountered during its many site visits.
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