With the contributions from leading national and international scholars and practitioners, this volume provides a "state-of-the-art" look at ID, addressing the major changes that have occurred in nearly every aspect of ID in the past decade and provides both theory and "how-to" information for ID and performance improvement practitioners practitioners who must stay current in their field.
This volume goes beyond other ID references in its approach: it is useful to students and practitioners at all levels; it is grounded in the most current research and theory; and it provides up-to-the-minute coverage of topics not found in any other ID book. It addresses timely topics such as cognitive task analysis, instructional strategies based on cognitive research, data collection methods, games, higher-order problem-solving and expertise, psychomotor learning, project management, partnering with clients, and managing a training function. It also provides a new way of looking at what ID is, and the most comprehensive history of ID ever published.
Sponsored by International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI), the Handbook of Improving Performance in the Workplace, three-volume reference, covers three core areas of interest including Instructional Design and Training Delivery, Selecting and Implementing Performance Interventions, and Measurement and Evaluation.
From the Inside Flap
With the contributions from leading national and international scholars and practitioners, this volume provides a "state-of-the-art" look at ID, addressing the major changes that have occurred in nearly every aspect of ID in the past decade and provides both theory and "how-to" information for ID and performance improvement practitioners practitioners who must stay current in their field.
This volume goes beyond other ID references in its approach: it is useful to students and practitioners at all levels; it is grounded in the most current research and theory; and it provides up-to-the-minute coverage of topics not found in any other ID book. It addresses timely topics such as cognitive task analysis, instructional strategies based on cognitive research, data collection methods, games, higher-order problem-solving and expertise, psychomotor learning, project management, partnering with clients, and managing a training function. It also provides a new way of looking at what ID is, and the most comprehensive history of ID ever published.
Sponsored by International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI), the Handbook of Improving Performance in the Workplace, three-volume reference, covers three core areas of interest including Instructional Design and Training Delivery, Selecting and Implementing Performance Interventions, and Measurement and Evaluation.
From the Back Cover
With the contributions from leading national and international scholars and practitioners, this volume provides a "state-of-the-art" look at ID, addressing the major changes that have occurred in nearly every aspect of ID in the past decade and provides both theory and "how-to" information for ID and performance improvement practitioners practitioners who must stay current in their field.
This volume goes beyond other ID references in its approach: it is useful to students and practitioners at all levels; it is grounded in the most current research and theory; and it provides up-to-the-minute coverage of topics not found in any other ID book. It addresses timely topics such as cognitive task analysis, instructional strategies based on cognitive research, data collection methods, games, higher-order problem-solving and expertise, psychomotor learning, project management, partnering with clients, and managing a training function. It also provides a new way of looking at what ID is, and the most comprehensive history of ID ever published.
Sponsored by International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI), the Handbook of Improving Performance in the Workplace, three-volume reference, covers three core areas of interest including Instructional Design and Training Delivery, Selecting and Implementing Performance Interventions, and Measurement and Evaluation.
About the Author
The Editors
Kenneth H. Silber is president of Silber Performance Consulting, associate professor emeritus from Northern Illinois University and adjunct professor at Capella University. He has been contributing to the performance consulting and instructional design fields since their inception forty years ago. He has co-authored several books, including the Instructional Design Competencies (IBSTPI), and Writing Training Materials That Work (Pfeiffer).
Wellesley (Rob) Foshay is director of research for the Education Technology Group of Texas Instruments. Through The Foshay Group, he speaks and publishes frequently and serves on the editorial board of four research journals in educational technology. He is a founding member of IBSTPI, and co-authored their Instructional Design Competencies. He served on the Board of Directors of ISPI, contributed to the creation of its certification program, and was honored with the Society's Member for Life and Distinguished Service awards. He has contributed over 70 major articles to research journal and books on a wide variety of topics in training, technology and education and is the co-author of Writing Training Materials That Work (Pfeiffer).
Some Principles Underlying the Cognitive Approach to Instructional Design
Wellesley R. Foshay
In the generation since the birth of the instructional design field, our understanding of the basic psychological mechanisms of memory, perception, learning, and problem solving has seen a great deal of development. Corresponding progress in our understanding of the psychology of instruction (or, if you prefer, design of learning environments) has led to important new definitions of principles of instructional design. For those familiar with the behavioral approach, this chapter will review what you already know and show how the cognitive approach differs. For those who have never had a formal study of the assumptions underlying the behavioral approach, this chapter will provide you with a theoretical understanding of the approach you probably have been using to date. Important additional principles are included in the chapters in Part Three. However, a full discussion of the psychology of learning and instruction is beyond the scope of this chapter and of this handbook. If you are interested in pursuing the subject matter further, references to sources from which this chapter is drawn are provided.
We do not mean to imply a disjunctive contrast between the behavioral and the cognitive approach, nor do we mean to imply that behavioral principles are obsolete-only that the cognitive approach often adds prescriptive utility to our practice over a wide range of training needs. Few instructional designers follow a purely behavioral or cognitive approach to design. Furthermore, in many cases the behavioral approach and the cognitive approach lead to similar design solutions. Therefore you may find that you are already using some principles of the cognitive approach in designing your instruction.
HOW THE BEHAVIORAL APPROACH IS DIFFERENT FROM THE COGNITIVE APPROACH
Generally speaking, behaviorism is a set of principles concerning both human and non-human behavior. One major behaviorist goal is to explain and predict observable behavior. Behaviorists define learning as the acquisition of new behavior as evidenced by changes in overt behavior. Behaviorism draws conclusions about behavior from research on external events: stimuli, effects, responses, learning history, and reinforcement. These behaviors are studied and observed in the environment and are explained with little or no reference to internal mental processing.
In dramatic contrast to behaviorism, a major tenet of cognitive psychology is that internal thought processes cause behavior. It is their understanding that can best explain human behavior. Cognitive information processing psychologists consider learning to be mental operations that include internally attending to (perceiving), encoding and structuring, and storing incoming information. Cognitive psychologists interpret external stimuli in terms of the way they are processed. They use observable behavior to make inferences about the mind. Furthermore, exciting new work in cognitive neuroscience is relating the structure of the brain to its function, and in the process, validating and elaborating on the accounts of processing and memory induced experimentally by the cognitive psychologists.
The difference in focus between the behaviorist and cognitive theories has important implications for instructional designers who seek design principles based on theory. The biggest differences are in these theoretical areas:
What learning is
Factors influencing learning
The role of memory and prior knowledge
How transfer occurs
The goal of instruction
The structure of instruction
Specific instructional strategies
Different types of learning are best explained by each approach, and each approach provides basic principles that guide instructional design in different circumstances.
What the implications are for each of the above areas and how they differ in each of the two approaches are shown in Table 1.1. It is important to note that some of the differences are merely semantic (for example, "fluency" and "automaticity" both describe degrees of learning proficiency), while some are more substantive. For example, "emphasis on knowledge structures" reflects the cognitive theory's recognition of the need to think about the parts of knowledge in any given subject and how they fit together.
WHY THE COGNITIVE APPROACH TO INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN IS IMPORTANT
The cognitive approach to ID has become prominent in the past two decades for two reasons, one based in the theory of learning and instructional design, the other based in business. From the perspective of theory, the cognitive approach seeks to overcome a number of limitations of the behavioral approach. For example, with the behavioral approach to ID:
Learners sometimes have trouble transferring what they have learned from training to the job;
Learners can have trouble attaining expert-level performance in troubleshooting and problem solving on the job;
Learners often have trouble generalizing their training from one situation to another, leading to skill gaps every time the job, content, or technology changes, and creating the need for retraining;
Learners may have difficulty with divergent reasoning (many right answers or many ways to get to the answer), as opposed to convergent reasoning (one right answer and one way to get it); and
Designers do not have adequate prescriptions for designing the kinds of training we are now being asked to design-problem solving, troubleshooting (especially in settings where content volatility is high), design, heuristic-based thinking (using guidelines versus algorithmic thinking, which uses formulas with 100 percent predictable outcomes), strategic thinking, and the like.
From the perspective of business, the current behavioral approach to ID sometimes leads to excessive development and delivery costs because it requires:
Longer training sessions, to cover all the specific algorithms or other content variations;
More retraining time, to address lack of transfer to new situations; and
More development time, because there are no guidelines for creating training for higher-order thinking, developers must either guess, or treat problem solving as a large number of low-level procedures and concepts.
The cognitive approach to ID offers remedies to these problems. It provides designers with another way to design training that works well in situations in which higher-order thinking, problem-solving, and transfer to new situations are training goals.
HOW LEARNING OCCURS ACCORDING TO THE COGNITIVE POINT OF VIEW
There are many theoretical models in cognitive psychology. Although there are important differences among them, they broadly agree on how learning occurs. According to these models, there are several components of the mind, and each is involved in the learning process in certain ways. How each component of the mind works has implications for how we design instruction. The components are
Perception and memory stores
Short-term or working memory
Long-term memory
Perception and Memory Stores
Perception Is Selective. There is more stimulation in the environment than we are capable of attending to, and then encoding (internally translating) for storage in memory. Therefore, we only attend to certain things. We attend to and see/hear what we expect to see in a given situation. We attend to those things that interest us because they are either (a) related to what we already know or (b) so novel they force us to attend to them.
Limits of the Sensory Stores.Our sensory stores, also called sensory memories (analogous to a computer's "buffers"), are capable of storing almost complete records of what we attend to. The catch is they hold those records very briefly . During that very brief time before the record decays, we do one of two things: (1) we note the relationships among the elements in the record and encode it into a more permanent memory or (2) we lose the record forever.
ID Implications. The implications of the selectiveness of perception and limitations of sensory stores for instructional designers are that it is crucial to:
Get the learner to attend to the parts of the environment that are crucial (hence the emphasis in the cognitive approach to ID on attention-getting and on motivational statements); and
Help the learner note relationships among the information quickly (hence the importance of organizing the information you are presenting and of clearly relating the new information to existing familiar or important contexts and knowledge).
Short-Term or Working Memory
Controversy. There is disagreement among cognitive psychologists about whether there is a short-term memory that is "separate and different" from long-term memory. The disagreement is about whether the two types of memory are physically different, or whether they are just conceptually different constructs. There is also discussion about how they encode information, how they store information, and so on. Regardless of the theoretical differences, some ideas that most psychologists would agree about can affect the design of training.
Rehearsal.When information is passed from the sensory stores to memory, we mentally rehearse it. Examples include repeating phone numbers several times or creating associations to names (for example,Tedwith theredhair) to help memorize them when you first hear them at a party. The former, simply repeating the information over and over, is called passive rehearsal . It does not seem to improve memory as well as rehearsing the information in a deep and meaningful way, like the latter way of creating associations.
Limited Capacity. There seems to be a limit on the amount of information we can rehearse at one time. A classic paper presented by a Bell Labs psychologist in 1956 showed that we can remember 7 +/- 2 bits of information at most, and that to remember more we have to "chunk" (or group) information in manageable sizes; that's why your phone number has seven digits, and when area codes became prominent, people were taught to remember phone numbers in three chunks (aaa-bbb-cccc). The findings of this study still seem to apply, with some modifications of how you define a "bit" (element) or a "chunk" (and, as you will see later in Part Four, the "7 +/- 2" estimate is probably too high in many circumstances).
Format. At this point in the learning process, the information being rehearsed is not yet organized and encoded as it will be when it is finally stored in memory. Also, there is some evidence that there are separate spaces for storing and rehearsing verbal information and visual/spatial information, and possibly separate spaces for other types of memories as well.
ID Implications. The implications are that instructional designers need to:
Help learners use meaningful ways of rehearsing the information, as opposed to simply repeating it (through the use of analogies, by relating new information to existing knowledge or problem situations, etc.);
Present the information in meaningful "chunks" of appropriate size for the learner population (knowing what your learners already know about the subject they are learning is critical to determining what "appropriate size" for those learners is);
Present the information in multiple formats (verbal, auditory, visual), which can help learners rehearse, and therefore remember, better; and
Present the information in a way that allows the learner to move quickly from rehearsing the information to encoding it and integrating (indexing) it with other information into long-term memory.
Long-Term Memory
In general, theorists believe that long-term memory is organized based on context and experience. That means we encode, store, and retrieve information in the way we have used knowledge in the past and expect to use it again in the future. There are several phenomena psychologists agree on about what strengthens the memory process.
Memory Strength.Information in memory has a characteristic called strength , which increases with practice. There is a power law of learning that governs the relationship between amount of practice and response time or error rates (Strength = Practice to power x). In simple terms, this means that practice increases the strength of learning exponentially (for example, double the practice at least squares the strength of the learned information in memory; triple the practice increases the strength by a factor of nine). Note that other factors, such as meaningfulness, also affect memory strength.
Elaboration. Elaboration means adding information to the information we are trying to learn. The more we elaborate on what we learn through processing, the better we remember it. This is because, as we tie the new information to existing information or as we create other information related to the new information, we create more pathways to get to the new information as we try to remember it.
Chunking. Memories are stored not as individual bits or as long strings of information, but in "chunks," with each chunk containing about seven elements. As explained in the section above on short-term memory, how big an "element" and a "chunk" are differs based on the learner's existing knowledge.
Verbal and Visual Information. It seems we encode verbal and visual information differently in memory. We use a linear code for verbal information, and a spatial code for visual information. We remember visual information very well, especially if we can place a meaningful interpretation on the visuals. In addition, the Gestalt psychology finding that we remember incomplete and strange images better than complete, standard ones still appears to hold true. With verbal information, we remember the meaning of the information, not the exact words.
Associations and Hierarchy. Information is organized in memory, grouped in a set of relationships or structures (for example, hierarchically). Using such a structure makes it easier for us to remember, because there are more related pieces of information activated when we search for information. While you may not remember one specific piece of information in the structure, you may remember the overall structure and some pieces in it, and from that you can remember or infer the missing piece of information. For example, you may not remember all the numbers in the 12 12 multiplication tables, but if you remember some key ones (1, 2, 3, and 5 a number) you can construct the rest.
By comparison with computers, humans can remember far fewer separate pieces of data, but are much better equipped for pattern recognition skills such as analogical reasoning, inference, and comprehension of visual and verbal languages.
ID Implications. The implications are that instructional designers need to:
Build a lot of meaningful practice into training to increase the probability of retention (for example, the PQ4R method: Preview, Questions, Read, Reflect, Review, Recite);
Provide learners with information (allowing them to create information that elaborates on the information to be learned);
Present the information in meaningful "chunks" of appropriate size for the learner population (knowing your learners is critical);
Present the information so it uses the abilities to remember both verbal and visual information, which can increase memory;
Hierarchically organize the information being presented (to approximate the way information is stored in memory) to increase retention;
Provide many associations to the information being learned to increase the chances that the information will be retrieved when called for;
Help learners to organize/index their memories so they have many associations, many retrieval paths, and appropriate structures; and
With the contributions from leading national and international scholars and practitioners, this volume provides a "state-of-the-art" look at ID, addressing the major changes that have occurred in nearly every aspect of ID in the past decade and provides both theory and "how-to" information for ID and performance improvement practitioners practitioners who must stay current in their field.
This volume goes beyond other ID references in its approach: it is useful to students and practitioners at all levels; it is grounded in the most current research and theory; and it provides up-to-the-minute coverage of topics not found in any other ID book. It addresses timely topics such as cognitive task analysis, instructional strategies based on cognitive research, data collection methods, games, higher-order problem-solving and expertise, psychomotor learning, project management, partnering with clients, and managing a training function. It also provides a new way of looking at what ID is, and the most comprehensive history of ID ever published.
Sponsored by International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI), the Handbook of Improving Performance in the Workplace, three-volume reference, covers three core areas of interest including Instructional Design and Training Delivery, Selecting and Implementing Performance Interventions, and Measurement and Evaluation.
From the Inside Flap
With the contributions from leading national and international scholars and practitioners, this volume provides a "state-of-the-art" look at ID, addressing the major changes that have occurred in nearly every aspect of ID in the past decade and provides both theory and "how-to" information for ID and performance improvement practitioners practitioners who must stay current in their field.
This volume goes beyond other ID references in its approach: it is useful to students and practitioners at all levels; it is grounded in the most current research and theory; and it provides up-to-the-minute coverage of topics not found in any other ID book. It addresses timely topics such as cognitive task analysis, instructional strategies based on cognitive research, data collection methods, games, higher-order problem-solving and expertise, psychomotor learning, project management, partnering with clients, and managing a training function. It also provides a new way of looking at what ID is, and the most comprehensive history of ID ever published.
Sponsored by International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI), the Handbook of Improving Performance in the Workplace, three-volume reference, covers three core areas of interest including Instructional Design and Training Delivery, Selecting and Implementing Performance Interventions, and Measurement and Evaluation.
From the Back Cover
With the contributions from leading national and international scholars and practitioners, this volume provides a "state-of-the-art" look at ID, addressing the major changes that have occurred in nearly every aspect of ID in the past decade and provides both theory and "how-to" information for ID and performance improvement practitioners practitioners who must stay current in their field.
This volume goes beyond other ID references in its approach: it is useful to students and practitioners at all levels; it is grounded in the most current research and theory; and it provides up-to-the-minute coverage of topics not found in any other ID book. It addresses timely topics such as cognitive task analysis, instructional strategies based on cognitive research, data collection methods, games, higher-order problem-solving and expertise, psychomotor learning, project management, partnering with clients, and managing a training function. It also provides a new way of looking at what ID is, and the most comprehensive history of ID ever published.
Sponsored by International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI), the Handbook of Improving Performance in the Workplace, three-volume reference, covers three core areas of interest including Instructional Design and Training Delivery, Selecting and Implementing Performance Interventions, and Measurement and Evaluation.
About the Author
The Editors
Kenneth H. Silber is president of Silber Performance Consulting, associate professor emeritus from Northern Illinois University and adjunct professor at Capella University. He has been contributing to the performance consulting and instructional design fields since their inception forty years ago. He has co-authored several books, including the Instructional Design Competencies (IBSTPI), and Writing Training Materials That Work (Pfeiffer).
Wellesley (Rob) Foshay is director of research for the Education Technology Group of Texas Instruments. Through The Foshay Group, he speaks and publishes frequently and serves on the editorial board of four research journals in educational technology. He is a founding member of IBSTPI, and co-authored their Instructional Design Competencies. He served on the Board of Directors of ISPI, contributed to the creation of its certification program, and was honored with the Society's Member for Life and Distinguished Service awards. He has contributed over 70 major articles to research journal and books on a wide variety of topics in training, technology and education and is the co-author of Writing Training Materials That Work (Pfeiffer).
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Handbook of Improving Performance in the Workplace, Instructional Design and Training Delivery
By Kenneth Silber Wellesley R. Foshay
John Wiley & Sons
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-19068-5
Chapter One
Some Principles Underlying the Cognitive Approach to Instructional Design
Wellesley R. Foshay
In the generation since the birth of the instructional design field, our understanding of the basic psychological mechanisms of memory, perception, learning, and problem solving has seen a great deal of development. Corresponding progress in our understanding of the psychology of instruction (or, if you prefer, design of learning environments) has led to important new definitions of principles of instructional design. For those familiar with the behavioral approach, this chapter will review what you already know and show how the cognitive approach differs. For those who have never had a formal study of the assumptions underlying the behavioral approach, this chapter will provide you with a theoretical understanding of the approach you probably have been using to date. Important additional principles are included in the chapters in Part Three. However, a full discussion of the psychology of learning and instruction is beyond the scope of this chapter and of this handbook. If you are interested in pursuing the subject matter further, references to sources from which this chapter is drawn are provided.
We do not mean to imply a disjunctive contrast between the behavioral and the cognitive approach, nor do we mean to imply that behavioral principles are obsolete-only that the cognitive approach often adds prescriptive utility to our practice over a wide range of training needs. Few instructional designers follow a purely behavioral or cognitive approach to design. Furthermore, in many cases the behavioral approach and the cognitive approach lead to similar design solutions. Therefore you may find that you are already using some principles of the cognitive approach in designing your instruction.
HOW THE BEHAVIORAL APPROACH IS DIFFERENT FROM THE COGNITIVE APPROACH
Generally speaking, behaviorism is a set of principles concerning both human and non-human behavior. One major behaviorist goal is to explain and predict observable behavior. Behaviorists define learning as the acquisition of new behavior as evidenced by changes in overt behavior. Behaviorism draws conclusions about behavior from research on external events: stimuli, effects, responses, learning history, and reinforcement. These behaviors are studied and observed in the environment and are explained with little or no reference to internal mental processing.
In dramatic contrast to behaviorism, a major tenet of cognitive psychology is that internal thought processes cause behavior. It is their understanding that can best explain human behavior. Cognitive information processing psychologists consider learning to be mental operations that include internally attending to (perceiving), encoding and structuring, and storing incoming information. Cognitive psychologists interpret external stimuli in terms of the way they are processed. They use observable behavior to make inferences about the mind. Furthermore, exciting new work in cognitive neuroscience is relating the structure of the brain to its function, and in the process, validating and elaborating on the accounts of processing and memory induced experimentally by the cognitive psychologists.
The difference in focus between the behaviorist and cognitive theories has important implications for instructional designers who seek design principles based on theory. The biggest differences are in these theoretical areas:
What learning is
Factors influencing learning
The role of memory and prior knowledge
How transfer occurs
The goal of instruction
The structure of instruction
Specific instructional strategies
Different types of learning are best explained by each approach, and each approach provides basic principles that guide instructional design in different circumstances.
What the implications are for each of the above areas and how they differ in each of the two approaches are shown in Table 1.1. It is important to note that some of the differences are merely semantic (for example, "fluency" and "automaticity" both describe degrees of learning proficiency), while some are more substantive. For example, "emphasis on knowledge structures" reflects the cognitive theory's recognition of the need to think about the parts of knowledge in any given subject and how they fit together.
WHY THE COGNITIVE APPROACH TO INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN IS IMPORTANT
The cognitive approach to ID has become prominent in the past two decades for two reasons, one based in the theory of learning and instructional design, the other based in business. From the perspective of theory, the cognitive approach seeks to overcome a number of limitations of the behavioral approach. For example, with the behavioral approach to ID:
Learners sometimes have trouble transferring what they have learned from training to the job;
Learners can have trouble attaining expert-level performance in troubleshooting and problem solving on the job;
Learners often have trouble generalizing their training from one situation to another, leading to skill gaps every time the job, content, or technology changes, and creating the need for retraining;
Learners may have difficulty with divergent reasoning (many right answers or many ways to get to the answer), as opposed to convergent reasoning (one right answer and one way to get it); and
Designers do not have adequate prescriptions for designing the kinds of training we are now being asked to design-problem solving, troubleshooting (especially in settings where content volatility is high), design, heuristic-based thinking (using guidelines versus algorithmic thinking, which uses formulas with 100 percent predictable outcomes), strategic thinking, and the like.
From the perspective of business, the current behavioral approach to ID sometimes leads to excessive development and delivery costs because it requires:
Longer training sessions, to cover all the specific algorithms or other content variations;
More retraining time, to address lack of transfer to new situations; and
More development time, because there are no guidelines for creating training for higher-order thinking, developers must either guess, or treat problem solving as a large number of low-level procedures and concepts.
The cognitive approach to ID offers remedies to these problems. It provides designers with another way to design training that works well in situations in which higher-order thinking, problem-solving, and transfer to new situations are training goals.
HOW LEARNING OCCURS ACCORDING TO THE COGNITIVE POINT OF VIEW
There are many theoretical models in cognitive psychology. Although there are important differences among them, they broadly agree on how learning occurs. According to these models, there are several components of the mind, and each is involved in the learning process in certain ways. How each component of the mind works has implications for how we design instruction. The components are
Perception and memory stores
Short-term or working memory
Long-term memory
Perception and Memory Stores
Perception Is Selective. There is more stimulation in the environment than we are capable of attending to, and then encoding (internally translating) for storage in memory. Therefore, we only attend to certain things. We attend to and see/hear what we expect to see in a given situation. We attend to those things that interest us because they are either (a) related to what we already know or (b) so novel they force us to attend to them.
Limits of the Sensory Stores. Our sensory stores, also called sensory memories (analogous to a computer's "buffers"), are capable of storing almost complete records of what we attend to. The catch is they hold those records very briefly . During that very brief time before the record decays, we do one of two things: (1) we note the relationships among the elements in the record and encode it into a more permanent memory or (2) we lose the record forever.
ID Implications. The implications of the selectiveness of perception and limitations of sensory stores for instructional designers are that it is crucial to:
Get the learner to attend to the parts of the environment that are crucial (hence the emphasis in the cognitive approach to ID on attention-getting and on motivational statements); and
Help the learner note relationships among the information quickly (hence the importance of organizing the information you are presenting and of clearly relating the new information to existing familiar or important contexts and knowledge).
Short-Term or Working Memory
Controversy. There is disagreement among cognitive psychologists about whether there is a short-term memory that is "separate and different" from long-term memory. The disagreement is about whether the two types of memory are physically different, or whether they are just conceptually different constructs. There is also discussion about how they encode information, how they store information, and so on. Regardless of the theoretical differences, some ideas that most psychologists would agree about can affect the design of training.
Rehearsal. When information is passed from the sensory stores to memory, we mentally rehearse it. Examples include repeating phone numbers several times or creating associations to names (for example, Ted with the red hair) to help memorize them when you first hear them at a party. The former, simply repeating the information over and over, is called passive rehearsal . It does not seem to improve memory as well as rehearsing the information in a deep and meaningful way, like the latter way of creating associations.
Limited Capacity. There seems to be a limit on the amount of information we can rehearse at one time. A classic paper presented by a Bell Labs psychologist in 1956 showed that we can remember 7 +/- 2 bits of information at most, and that to remember more we have to "chunk" (or group) information in manageable sizes; that's why your phone number has seven digits, and when area codes became prominent, people were taught to remember phone numbers in three chunks (aaa-bbb-cccc). The findings of this study still seem to apply, with some modifications of how you define a "bit" (element) or a "chunk" (and, as you will see later in Part Four, the "7 +/- 2" estimate is probably too high in many circumstances).
Format. At this point in the learning process, the information being rehearsed is not yet organized and encoded as it will be when it is finally stored in memory. Also, there is some evidence that there are separate spaces for storing and rehearsing verbal information and visual/spatial information, and possibly separate spaces for other types of memories as well.
ID Implications. The implications are that instructional designers need to:
Help learners use meaningful ways of rehearsing the information, as opposed to simply repeating it (through the use of analogies, by relating new information to existing knowledge or problem situations, etc.);
Present the information in meaningful "chunks" of appropriate size for the learner population (knowing what your learners already know about the subject they are learning is critical to determining what "appropriate size" for those learners is);
Present the information in multiple formats (verbal, auditory, visual), which can help learners rehearse, and therefore remember, better; and
Present the information in a way that allows the learner to move quickly from rehearsing the information to encoding it and integrating (indexing) it with other information into long-term memory.
Long-Term Memory
In general, theorists believe that long-term memory is organized based on context and experience. That means we encode, store, and retrieve information in the way we have used knowledge in the past and expect to use it again in the future. There are several phenomena psychologists agree on about what strengthens the memory process.
Memory Strength. Information in memory has a characteristic called strength , which increases with practice. There is a power law of learning that governs the relationship between amount of practice and response time or error rates (Strength = Practice to power x). In simple terms, this means that practice increases the strength of learning exponentially (for example, double the practice at least squares the strength of the learned information in memory; triple the practice increases the strength by a factor of nine). Note that other factors, such as meaningfulness, also affect memory strength.
Elaboration. Elaboration means adding information to the information we are trying to learn. The more we elaborate on what we learn through processing, the better we remember it. This is because, as we tie the new information to existing information or as we create other information related to the new information, we create more pathways to get to the new information as we try to remember it.
Chunking. Memories are stored not as individual bits or as long strings of information, but in "chunks," with each chunk containing about seven elements. As explained in the section above on short-term memory, how big an "element" and a "chunk" are differs based on the learner's existing knowledge.
Verbal and Visual Information. It seems we encode verbal and visual information differently in memory. We use a linear code for verbal information, and a spatial code for visual information. We remember visual information very well, especially if we can place a meaningful interpretation on the visuals. In addition, the Gestalt psychology finding that we remember incomplete and strange images better than complete, standard ones still appears to hold true. With verbal information, we remember the meaning of the information, not the exact words.
Associations and Hierarchy. Information is organized in memory, grouped in a set of relationships or structures (for example, hierarchically). Using such a structure makes it easier for us to remember, because there are more related pieces of information activated when we search for information. While you may not remember one specific piece of information in the structure, you may remember the overall structure and some pieces in it, and from that you can remember or infer the missing piece of information. For example, you may not remember all the numbers in the 12 12 multiplication tables, but if you remember some key ones (1, 2, 3, and 5 a number) you can construct the rest.
By comparison with computers, humans can remember far fewer separate pieces of data, but are much better equipped for pattern recognition skills such as analogical reasoning, inference, and comprehension of visual and verbal languages.
ID Implications. The implications are that instructional designers need to:
Build a lot of meaningful practice into training to increase the probability of retention (for example, the PQ4R method: Preview, Questions, Read, Reflect, Review, Recite);
Provide learners with information (allowing them to create information that elaborates on the information to be learned);
Present the information in meaningful "chunks" of appropriate size for the learner population (knowing your learners is critical);
Present the information so it uses the abilities to remember both verbal and visual information, which can increase memory;
Hierarchically organize the information being presented (to approximate the way information is stored in memory) to increase retention;
Provide many associations to the information being learned to increase the chances that the information will be retrieved when called for;
Help learners to organize/index their memories so they have many associations, many retrieval paths, and appropriate structures; and
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Excerpted from Handbook of Improving Performance in the Workplace, Instructional Design and Training Deliveryby Kenneth Silber Wellesley R. Foshay Copyright © 2010 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission.
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