Problem Solving

Hurray for brevity. Less IS more!

/ Susan Hendrich / Leave a comment

Want your learning audience to retain more and perform better?  Then lighten their cognitive load.

Cognitive load theory says that “the more a person has to learn in a shorter amount of time, the more difficult it is to process that information in working memory.” Add to this processing difficulty the fact that we retain less when overloaded with data, information, and concepts. The idea behind cognitive load theory is that reducing the volume of information to be learned to only the “need to know” level lets the learner retain more of the information and make the necessary transfer of learning to be able to perform a skill or task.   And that might just be a very good thing when it comes to designing training.

“By reducing the load on the cognitive system, summaries may enable students to carry out the cognitive processes necessary for meaningful learning.” 

From When Less Is More: Meaningful Learning From Visual and Verbal Summaries of Science Textbook Lessons, by Richard E. Mayer, William Bove, Alexandra Bryman, Rebecca Mars, and Lene Tapangco 

What does this mean about people’s desire and tolerance for information?

Twitter taught us that we’re in a sound bite zeitgeist. When it comes to information and learning, we want it short. Sweet. To the point. Quick. Rapid. Just the facts. Twitter? Yammer? What’s the matter?  

Despite growing research supporting this “less-is-more” notion, it can be hard for subject matter experts to let go of the urge to create an information dump when designing training. Experts sometimes get stuck in the mindset of, “more is more,” and struggle to see how presenting a more basic volume of information might lead to better learning. Parsing out the nice-to-know from the need-to-know is the great challenge of the instructional designer.  Having a little less-is-more research in the back pocket might just come in handy for the designer who’s trying to convince a subject matter expert to limiting content to the need-to-know level.

Check out Cathy Moore’s “Making Change” blog post about an early study that showed the positive impact of reducing the amount of text presented to a summary on the ability to retain and transfer learning.

Learning and the Pursuit of Shibumi

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“When in doubt about do or don’t, don’t.”

That’s my my new mantra. Almost sounds lazy, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not actually.

It’s all about Shibumi.  That’s spelled, 渋み. And it’s all about editing. Refining. Reducing. Simplifying.

Shibumi: “The ability to achieve the maximum effect with the minimum means” – Rough translation of a Japanese Zen concept

Shibumi is a concept I have been consciously (and even unconsciously) searching for since childhood, although I didn’t know the name for it until recently. The concept of Shibumi refers to a particular aesthetic of simple, subtle, and unobtrusive beauty. It reflects the ability of a person (or organization, or object d’arte) to achieve effortless effectiveness, elegant simplicity, and the height of excellence.

There are five key steps to reach shibumi:

  1. commitment
  2. preparation
  3. struggle
  4. breakthrough
  5. transformation

Read this short and insightful article if you want to learn more: Learning and the Pursuit of Shibumi – Chief Learning Officer, Solutions for Enterprise Productivity.

Susan

What does the Dunning–Kruger Effect mean to you?

/ Susan Hendrich / 1 Comment

I literally stumbled upon the Dunning–Kruger effect on Wikipedia today, and it gave me an ah-hah moment. I’ll describe my moment of insight shortly, but first let’s look at the Dunning–Kruger effect:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. “Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.   – From the “Dunning-Kruger Effect” on Wikipedia

So, let me get this straight (to the tune of the Hokey Pokey)…

You put a lack of skill in + a resulting bad decision + an erroneous conclusion = inflated self-assessment

Presence of skill + inflated assessment of others’ skill = inaccurately low self-assessment

In other words, the very people who should be seeing themselves as more skilled, actually have less confidence in their own skills and over-estimate the capabilities of others. 

What could this mean for training design and development?  That’s where my Ah-hah moment comes in. But, you’ll have to wait, because I’m not confident enough in my thought process to actually tell you about it. So, does that mean I’m encountering the Dunning-Kruger effect?

Oh, and just in case you’re wondering whether (a) these guys know what they are talking about, or (b) instead they suffer from their own posited effect, Dunning and Kruger were awarded the Ig Nobel Prizes in Psychology in 2000 for their report, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.”

Creative Slump? Try Something, Anything New

/ Susan Hendrich / 3 Comments

Creative Slump? Try Something, Anything New

The Slump

As Spring 2010 settled in, I found myself in a creative rut. Not that I wasn’t coming up with some pretty good instructional design solutions. I just didn’t have the sparkly “kick” in my design step.

My first instinct in considering how to clear the innovation fog was to focus on learning something new about instructional design. “Surely there is some new technique or method out there that will inspire me back into my creative groove,” I told myself. Four hours of semi-conscious web surfing for articles on social networking, blogging, graphic design, and adult learning later, I was in no better creative place than when I first started this aimless journey.

“A good night’s sleep will do the trick,” I murmured to myself in lieu of clicking the Facebook link one last time before throwing the creative towel. Another half hour passed, and while I now was up to speed on my Facebook friends’ opinions on skirt lengths, parasailing, potty training, and bar hopping, I was no closer to sleep than to a creative revelation.

Defeated, I dragged myself to bed.

The Surge

Disarmed of my intellectual shortcomings by the start of my semi-conscious snooze, it came to me…

“Cake Pops!”

No, this was not some animated .gif I would create for a PowerPoint presentation. Nor was it a racy idea for an attention grabber at the beginning of a module. I had realized that my creative sparkle could be restored through an age-old domestic act. Baking.

I recalled seeing some Martha Stewart-y web article on “Cake Pops,” which showed fun bite-sized cake creatures perched firmly on a lollipop stick. “I’ll try it! Should be a piece of cake,” I chuckled to no one in particular, mildly amused by the metaphoric ease of my belief that the creation of these mini-masterpieces could be mastered in a single shot.

So, 67 dollars and one maddening pre-Easter Michael’s trip later, I had everything I needed to make cake pops. Or at least that’s what the “easy cake pop instructions” recipe at Bakerella.com promised. What then ensued can only be described as a tortuous 12 hours of mixing, scraping, baking, shaping, smooshing, poking, and re-attaching nightmare. I kind of loved it, even though at one point I threw an unfrosted cake ball (a pre-cake pop iteration) against my refrigerator in disgust.

My first cake pops were disasterously, unmanageably bad. Think of ABC gum smashed under an old shoe, then jammed with two jelly beans and told to stand up straight and look presentable. Yuck.

Two batches later, the sugared semi-orbs actually started to look like they were intended to look – bunnies and chicks. I was getting my groove now. The bunnies were pink with googly eyes and the beaks of the chicks looked as cute as they did real. Almost unnoticeably, I began putting my own twist on the not-nearly-as-easy-as-they-promised recipe instructions.

Here’s a view of the final products:

Hendrich's Cake Pops

After the final bunny was built and the last chick was cast, I was both mentally exhausted and creatively invigorated. After saran wrapping the last of the munchable art, I flopped into bed and was asleep in seconds.

Getting out of my comfort zone for those 12 hours initiated a creative flow over the next week at work that shocked me. I was in the groove, coming up with innovative and simpler ways of training my customers. But what perhaps is even more exciting is the fact that I had a renewed verve for life in general. An extra spring in my step. And an almost constant feeling that I was just about to conjure another cool idea. Not because I’d attended a webinar in my field of study. Not because I’d read a book to enhance my expertise. But because I tried something utterly new.

Moral of the story: Getting out of my comfort zone and trying something new initiated a creative flow in all areas of my life, both personal and professional. The simple (okay, not exactly simple) act of learning to do something I had never done before restored my curiosity, my creative inspiration, and even my confidence. And the learning was not in my area of expertise. In fact, prior to that day, I would not call myself a baker of any kind.

 Perhaps the old saying is true…

You can create your cake and eat it, too.