Learning Research & Science
Insights culled from analysis and inquiry that keep learning professionals up-to-date on how people learn, technologies, approaches, and performance improvement practices.
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Brain Science: Pre-training Is Essential to a Complete Training Package
When the long-term training goal is retention and transfer of skills and knowledge, effective instructional design recognizes that certain key activities before and after a learning event (including eLearning and mLearning as well as instructor-led learning) are more important to success than what happens during the learning event. This article explains what pre-training is and its benefits.
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Brain Science: The Ultimate Mission of a Teacher
What is your goal as a teacher, an instructional designer, a training manager? What is the single aim of all teaching? This month’s column moves from research to application in the service of making a better world.
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Brain Science: Should Learning Be Easy? How Effortful Processing Improves Retention
For many instructional designers and teachers, one finding from research is so puzzling that they reject it immediately: that infusing training with strategic difficulties and challenges dramatically improves the learner’s long-term retention. Shouldn’t learning be easy? This month, Professor Kohn looks at the research and begins the discussion of how to apply it.
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eLearning Guild Research: Informal Learning With and Without L&D
It’s easy to guess that informal learning is different when it takes place outside the influence of the training department or L&D, but how is it different when it happens outside that arena? The newest Guild research report shines a light on the differences in a way that will help you leverage informal learning in both sets of circumstances. Read the highlights here!
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eLearning Guild Research: Informal or “Less Formal” Learning?
When experts use the term “informal learning,” they don’t mean exactly the same thing eLearning and learning practitioners do. The latest eLearning Guild research report “Informal Learning Takes Off,” written by Jane Hart, highlights the differences as well as some innovative approaches you may want to try.
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Brain Science: The Visual System and Learning
Neuroscience has learned a lot about the way that the brain processes visual information. This article provides insights into the two distinct visual systems that operate concurrently and independently. Understanding these systems and how they work will provide instructional designers with important information bearing on ways to increase comprehension, retention, and transfer.
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Brain Science: Writing So the Brain Understands
Much of what we communicate in eLearning and other kinds of teaching relies on the written word. Many instructional designers worry that learners may be poor readers and so try to “write down to their level.” Is this the right approach? Is reading ability even a problem? Or is the problem our approach to writing? Here are some guidelines that may surprise you.
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eLearning Guild Research: Basic Skills Gaps and Our Role
The eLearning Guild’s newest research report says training ROI studies are flawed because they do not measure results. Executives told us one question interested them more than ROI: Do employees have the skills needed to do their jobs? A study on that issue by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has huge implications for education and training. Read about it here.
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eLearning Guild Research: How Should We Measure Training’s Value? Not ROI.
Is ROI (return on investment) an appropriate measure to demonstrate whether eLearning was effective? Do executives and decision-makers actually care about ROI measures of learning, or do they look for other non-financial, perhaps intangible, evidence that eLearning worked? A new eLearning Guild research report offers some stunning new ideas about the right answers to these questions.
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Brain Science: Focus–Can You Pay Attention?
Researchers have reported that the average attention span of American adults has dropped, possibly to even as little as five minutes. Is this due, as other researchers suggest, to changes in the human brain, brought about by modern technologies such as television and the Internet? Maybe, maybe not. Art opens a discussion of what we know about helping people pay attention.