Summary of the Article

Manipulations that speed the rate of acquisition during training can fail to support long-term post-training performance, while other manipulations that appear to introduce difficulties for the learner during training can enhance post-training performance

Two Factors Contribute to Non-optimal Training:

1. The learner’s own misreading of his or her progress and current state of knowledge during training
2. Non-optimal relationships between the conditions of training and the conditions that can be expected to prevail in post-training real-world environment

The goals of teaching are long-term goals

• Knowledge and skills that are durable and survive long periods of disuse.
• To develop a mental representation of the knowledge or skills that allows for flexible access to that knowledge or skills
• Representations that allows the learner to draw on what has been learned in order to perform in the real world conditions that differ from the conditions of the training

Measuring Learning

Measuring what someone knows or can do in some standard situations does not tell you what they can do in a different situation or when the conditions are different from those of the training. Even superficial changes can disrupt performance remarkably.

Transfer of Learning

Perceived similarity or the lack thereof, of new tasks to old tasks is a critical factor in the transfer of learning. Effective teaching should help the learner to recognize when the knowledge and skills acquired during training are and are not applicable to new problems. What we want in terms of human memory is –teaching that not only produces a stored representation of the knowledge in LTM, but also to yield a representation that remains accessible (recallable) as time passes and contextual cues change

Recall Cause Deep Learning

The act of retrieving information is itself a potent learning event. The retrieved information becomes more recallable in the future. As a learning event, in fact, it appears that a successful retrieval can be considerably more potent than an additional study opportunity, particularly in terms of facilitating long-term recall.

In general creating durable memory and flexible memory is partly a matter of achieving a certain type of encoding of that information and partly practicing the retrieval process

Encoding:

1. An understanding of the material which involves a broader framework of interrelated concepts and ideas
2. Critical information needs to multiply encoded, not bound to a single set of semantic or situational cues

Retrieval

Practicing the production of the knowledge

Example–one chance to actually put on the inflatable like vest on the airplane would result in a person being more likely to be able to use the vest in an emergency—than the many times we have been told and shown by the stewardess.

It is also desirable to induce successful access to knowledge and procedures in a variety of situations that differ in the cues they give and do not give.

Basis Principles to Produce Long Term Learning

Introduce many more difficulties and challenges for the learner than are usually present in the typical teacher’s classroom

Introducing variation and/or unpredictability in the teaching environment causes difficulty for the learner but enhances long-term recall—especially the ability to transfer the knowledge to novel but related tasks

Example in motor skill performance scheduling, rather than blocking the trails practice trial in random fashion by task type has shown to impair performance during training but enhance long term performance

Use of Testing

The act of retrieval induced by recall tests can be considerably more potent than a study opportunity in facilitating future recall. Study recall produced better immediate recall but test trails produced better recall after 48 hours.

Expanding retrieval practice, in which successive recall tests are made progressively more difficult by increasing the time and intervening events prior to each next test facilitates long-term recall substantially—

The cause of the better recall is likely that the learner in responding to the difficulties and challenges and the manipulations is forced into more elaborate encoding processes and more substantial and varied retrieval processes

Misperception by Teachers

The tendency of teachers is to be pushed toward instruction that maximizes the performance or evaluation reaction of the students—this is made worse by institutions that evaluate the teacher on the immediate reactions of the students not the long term gains that they make.

Metamemory

Another important measure of learning is the degree to which students gain a valid assessment of their own state of learning or competence. Individuals who have illusions of comprehension or competence pose a greater hazard to themselves and others than do individuals who correctly assess that they lack some requisite information or skill.

It is as important to educate subjective experience as it is objective experience

Rapids progress in the form of improved performance is reassuring to the learner even though little learning may be taking place

Where as struggling and making errors is distressing, even though substantial learning may be taking place

It is clear from the current research that memory is remarkably multifaceted

One subjective or objective measure of the strength of a memory representation may not correlate with the strength of a different subjective or objective measure

The learner because of the condition of the learning—blocked practice—immediate feedback, fixing of the learning conditions may be artificially supported during the learning—resulting in a false sense of long term readiness

The learner can rely too heavily on an unreliable index—the current ease of access to the information or skill—as a measure of the extent to which learning in a broader sense has been achieved

Conclusion

Some of the best ways to achieve the goal of long-term gain are:

• Varying the conditions of the learning
• Inducing contextual interference
• Distributing practice
• Reducing the frequency of augmented feedback
• Using tests as learning events

However students (and institutions) must be made receptive to these types of manipulations and change their attitudes towards the meaning of errors and mistakes.

People learn by making mistakes and correcting them—learning environments that prevent certain mistakes form happening –and give the students a false sense of competence my be just delaying the mistakes to the post learning setting (work) where they really matter.

Finally when we embark on any substantial learning enterprise we should probably find the absence, not the presence, of errors, mistakes and difficulties to be distressing

We often fall short of helping students to learn for long term recall by failing to incorporate the variability, delays, uncertainties, and other challenges that learner can be expected to face in the real world.

Faculty wanting further information about any of these topics are encouraged to contact Terry Doyle at doylet@ferris.edu



Check back for updates!
Website comments?  Contact danielsl@ferris.edu