Will at Work Learning

Rethinking Instructional Objectives

Clark Quinn (blog, website, Twitter)  recently cited some of my thinking about instructional objectives in the instructional technology forum of AECT (ITFORUM). I wrote a long email to Clark in response, thanking him, and going into more detail. I am reprising my response to Clark here:

In a recent post to this list, Clark Quinn rightly notes that objectives for learners and objectives for instructional designers need not be identical. Indeed, as both Clark and I have previously noted, the probably shouldn’t be identical.

Here’s the thinking: Objectives are designed to guide behavior. So, how can it be that identically-worded objectives can adequately guide the behavior of two disparate groups of individuals (learners and instructional designers)? It just doesn’t make any sense!!

And indeed, Hamilton (1985) found that presenting learners with learning objectives in the way Mager suggested, PRODUCES NO BENEFITS AND MAY BE HARMFUL. Here’s what Hamilton wrote:

“[An instructional] objective that generally identifies the information to be learned in the text will produce robust effects. Including other information (per Mager’s, 1962, definition) will not significantly help and it may hinder the effects of the objectives”

(Hamilton, 1985, p. 78).

Objectives are not only designed to change behavior for a particular set of individuals, but they are also designed with particular purposes in mind—or they should be.

So, when we talk of instructional objectives, we also need to think about what purpose we have for them.

The quote above from Hamilton is focused on how well learning objectives focus the attention of learners. Interestingly, this is the only area in which extensive research has been done on learning objectives. You might be surprised to know that learning objectives help learners focus on the information targeted by learning objectives, but actually diminish their attention on information in the learning materials not targeted by learning objectives. For example, in two experiments using specific objectives, Rothkopf and Billington (1979) found that when focusing objectives were provided to learners, performance on material related to the objectives improved by 49% and 47% over situations when focusing objectives were not used. However, the material not related to the learning objectives was learned 39% and 33% WORSE than it would have been if no learning objectives were used!

These types of instructional objectives—presented to learners prior to subsequent learning—I call “focusing objectives” because they are designed for the purpose of focusing learner attention on critical learning material. As the Hamilton (1985) review pointed out, it does NOT help to add Mager’s criterion information to focusing objectives, because it doesn’t help learners focus on the critical material.

NOW, here’s an important point (I say to focus your attention):  We don’t necessarily need to use focusing objectives with learners if we have other means to focus their attention!! We can use a relevant, gripping story. We can do a shout-out (example, “Here’s an important point…”). We can have them attempt to answer a relevant scenario-based question and struggle with it. Etcetera.

Here’s another important point: Focusing objectives are only one type of objective we might want to utilize. I have a whole list, and I’m sure you can think of more of them.

Instructional Objectives for Learners:

1. Table-of-Contents Objectives
   To give learners a big picture sense of what will be taught.
2. Performance Objectives
   To let learners know what performance will be expected of them.
3. Motivation Objective
   To ensure learners know why they might be motivated to engage the learning or application of the learning.
4. Focusing Objective
   To guide learner attention to the most critical information in the learning material.

Instructional Objectives for Developers:

1. Instructional-Design Objective
   To guide developers toward the ultimate goal of the learning intervention.
2. Evaluation Objective
   To guide developers (and other stakeholders) to the ultimate measurable outcomes that the learning intervention will be measured by.
3. Situation Objectives
   To guide developers to the situations that learners must be prepared for.
4. Organization Objective
   To guide developers to the organizational effects targeted by the instruction.

Questions:

So, here’s some questions for you:

Is it okay to use the word understand in an “instructional-design objective”?

How about in a “focusing objective”?

Answer: It’s okay to use the word understand in a focusing objective—because it does not hurt the learner in setting them up to focus attention on critical concepts. But it is NOT okay to use the word understand in an instructional-design objective—because the word “understand” doesn’t have enough specificity to guide instructional design.

My point in asking these questions is to show that over-simplistic notions about instructional objectives are likely to be harmful to your instructional designs.

As usual, the research helps us see things we wouldn’t otherwise have seen.

Hope this helps!!

= Will

 

References

Hamilton, R. J. (1985). A framework for the evaluation of the effectiveness of adjunct questions and objectives. Review of Educational Research, 55, 47-85.

Mager, R. (1962). Preparing Instructional Objectives. Palo Alto, CA: Fearon Publishers.

Rothkopf, E. Z., & Billington, M. J. (1979). Goal-guided learning from text: Inferring a descriptive processing model from inspection times and eye movements. Journal of Educational Psychology, 71(3), 310-327.

Support Elliott Masie's War on Frivolous LMS Trademarks

I urge you to support Elliott Masie's war on frivolous LMS Trademarks. Here's what Elliott wrote in his newsletter:

Help! Defend Learning Field from Patent Suit! The learning "patent trolls" are at it again. There is a company called IPLearn that has unfortunately successfully sued over a dozen learning management system - claiming they have invented many of the core elements of technology delivered learning.  Sure, they wrote several clever patents that claim to have created much of the field - and, with an understaffed patent office, it was approved - though there were many prior learning and technology implementations.  And, their strategy, which has worked, is to sue a company - get the discovery and legal costs up and up, and finally settle for a fee and stock shares.  All, without having invented, produced or created anything - other than a few patent apps.

I have worked, without fee, against their efforts several times and now they are at it again.  They have brought suits against several major LMS companies - and I am asking Learning TRENDS readers to help gather any manuals, documents or other experiences you have had with these earlier corporate learning systems:

• Registrar,” by Silton-Bookman Systems.
• Learning Organization Information System (LOIS),” by KnowledgeSoft, Inc.
• Etude,” by Gerald Hollingsworth and GPU, Inc.
• Continuous Learning System (CLS),” by AT&T Global Information Solutions International, Inc.

The lawyers defending against the IPLearn suit would love to see any samples of anything that describes the operation or public availability of these systems.  For example:  user manuals, help files, demonstration videos, brochures, press releases, and actual program disks/CDs. 

If you can help, would you send a note to my office at emasie@masie.com and we will contact you back.  Many thanks!

While I'm not a trademark expert, and I support people and organizations who truly do create something new and unique, trademarks that aren't deserving hurt our industry and our learners.

Measuring Social Media as a Learning Tool

A while back, I wrote an article for the eLearning Guild which was essentially about measuring social media as a learning tool. We called social media "Learning 2.0" but the issue is the same. Here is the article.

I'm reprising that here, because I just read Ettiene Wenger's (2011) article where he talks about measuring social media, and I am once again disappointed that opportunity costs and costs of bad-information are not recognized.

CEO's Do NOT Successfully Transfer Their Skills to Other Companies!

In a recent, NY Time Article, GRETCHEN MORGENSON cited a paper (Executive Superstars, Peer Groups and Over-­‐Compensation –Cause, Effect and Solution) by Charles M. Elson and Craig K. Ferrere who compile research from others (see citations below) that basically shows that CEO's do NOT successfully transfer their skills from one company to another. CEO's who are hired from within tend to do a much better job than CEO's brought in from the outside.

We in the learning-and-performance field should take note. The reason this is true is because it takes real-world expertise, gained through long bouts of experience in a particular set of situations, to give people the tools they need to be experts.

This we should all know. If you want to be good in calculus as it applies to astronomy, you ought to get practice in applying calculus to astronomy. It is not enough to just learn calculus and learn astromony.

And certainly it is not helpful to learn Latin to learn math, or even to learn other languages. Anybody who has been to graduate school in learning should have learned about how unlikely it is for learning to transfer from one domain to the other. Thorndike anyone?

Donald Clark has a nice blog post on Thorndike and the uselessness of learning latin.

So, from both a training and on-the-job learning perspective, we should be giving our learners extensive opportunities to learn their areas of expertise.

This doesn't mean they should never dabble in other domains. In fact, creativity research shows that "domain-spanners" are more likely to be creative than those who only learn with a narrow focus. HOWEVER, people who are only domain-spanners (and don't know a field really well) tend to just be good at coming up with ideas--but not generally good ones. Expertise matters!

Those of you in the United States who are thinking about our election in terms of this lack of transfer from one job situation to another could have a field day...or a depression.

 

Some of Elson and Ferrere's citations showing that CEO's skills don't transfer well:

Richard A. Cazier and John M. McInnis, Do Firms Contract Efficiently on Past Performance When Hiring External CEOs? (Working Paper, 2010) (studying 192 external successions from 1993-2005 they find a negative correlation between excess compensation and future performance;; paradoxically the superstars underperformed).

Gregory L. Nagel, William G. Hardin III, The Transferability of CEO Skills, (Working Paper, 2007)

Mark R. Huson, Paul H. Malatesta and Robert Parrino, Managerial succession and firm performance, 74 J. FIN. ECON. 237, 237 (2004) (finding that “the appointment of outside successors [is] not significantly related to post-turnover performance changes in [their] regression analysis.”)

Chuck Lucier, Steven Wheeler, and Rolf Habbel, The Era of the Inclusive Leader, 47 STRATEGY+BUSINESS (2007) (finding that “experienced CEOs”, though hypothesized to bring experience in dealing with stakeholders and shareholders actually underperformed).

James S. Ang and Gregory L. Nagel, The Financial Outcome of Hiring a CEO from Outside the Firm, (Working Paper, 18, 34, 2011) (using a structural self-selection model to estimate counterfactual performance that would have been obtained if the firm hired an insider rather than an outsider and vice-versa, at all target levels of performance internal hires stochastically dominate outsiders).

A Better Youth Soccer Evaluation Form

As a youth soccer coach for many years I have struggled to evaluate my own players and have seen how my soccer league evaluates players to place them on teams. As a professional learning-and-performance consultant who has focused extensively on measurement and evaluation, I think we can all do better, me included. To this end, I have spent the last two years creating a series of evaluation tools for use by coaches and youth soccer leagues. I’m sure these forms are not perfect, but I’m absolutely positive that they will be a huge improvement over the typical forms utilized by most youth soccer organizations. I have developed the forms so that they can be modified and they are made available for free to anyone who coaches youth soccer.

At the bottom of this post, I'll include a list of the most common mistakes that are made in youth-soccer evaluation. For my regular blog readers--those who come to me for research-based recommendations on workplace learning-and-performance--you'll see relevance to your own work in this list of evaluation mistakes.

I have developed four separate forms for evaluation. That may seem like a lot until you see how they will help you as a coach (and as a soccer league) meet varied goals you have. I will provide each form as a PDF (so you can see what the form is supposed to look like regardless of your computer configuration) and as a Word Document (so you can make changes if you like).

I've also provided a short set of instructions.

• Instructions and Rationale

  
The Forms

1.   Player Ranking Form:  This form evaluates players on 26 soccer competencies and 4 player-comparison items, giving each player a numerical score based on these items AND an overall rating. This form is intended to provide leagues with ranking information so that they can better place players on teams for the upcoming season.

• PDF---Will's_Youth-Soccer_PLAYER_RANKING_FORM_v2.0
• WORD---Will's_Youth-Soccer_PLAYER_RANKING_FORM_v2.0
  

  
2. Player Development Form:  This form evaluates players on the 26 soccer competencies. This form is intended for use by coaches to help support their players in development. Indeed, this form can be shared with players and parents to help players focus on their development needs.

• PDF---Will's_Youth-Soccer_PLAYER_DEVELOPMENT_FORM_v2.0
• WORD---Will's_Youth-Soccer_PLAYER_DEVELOPMENT_FORM_v2.0

   
3. Team Evaluation Form:  This form helps coaches use practices and games to evaluate their players on the 26 key competencies. Specifically, it enables them to use one two-page form to evaluate every player on their team.

• PDF---Will's_Youth-Soccer_TEAM_REVIEW_FORM_v2.0
• WORD---Will's_Youth-Soccer_TEAM_REVIEW_FORM_v2.0

  
4. Field Evaluation Form:  This form enables skilled evaluators to judge the performance of players during small-group scrimmages. Like the Player Ranking Form, it provides player-comparison information to leagues (or to soccer clubs).

• PDF---Will's_Youth-Soccer_FIELD_EVALUATION_FORM_v2.0
• WORD---Will's_Youth-Soccer_FIELD_EVALUATION_FORM_v2.0
  

  
The Most Common Mistakes in Youth-Soccer Evaluation

1. When skills evaluated are not clear to evaluators. So for example, having players rated on their “agility” will not provide good data because “agility” will likely mean different things to different people.
2. When skills are evaluated along too many dimensions. So for example, evaluating a player on their “ball-handling skills, speed, and stamina” covers too many dimensions at once—a player could have excellent ball-handling skills but have terrible stamina.
3. When the rating scales that evaluators are asked to use make it hard to select between different levels of competence. So for example, while “ball-handling” might reasonably be evaluated, it may be hard for an evaluator to determine whether a player is excellent, very good, average, fair, or poor in ball-handling. Generally, it is better to have clear criteria and ask whether or not a player meets those criteria. Four or Five-Point scales are not recommended.
4. When evaluators can’t assess skills because of the speed of action, the large number of players involved, or the difficulty of noticing the skills targeted. For example, evaluations of scrimmages that involve more than four players on a side make it extremely difficult for the evaluators to notice the contributions of each player.
5. When bias affects evaluators’ judgments. Because the human mind is always working subconsciously, biases can be easily introduced. So for example, it is bad practice to give evaluators the coaches’ ratings of players before those players take part in a scrimmage-based evaluation.
6. When bias leads to a generalized positive or negative evaluation. Because evaluation is difficult and is largely a subconscious process, a first impression can skew an evaluation away from what is valid. For example, when a player is seen as getting outplayed in the first few minutes of a scrimmage, his/her later excellent play may be ignored or downplayed. Similarly, when a player is intimidated early in the season, a coach may not fully notice his/her gritty determination later in the year.
7. When bias comes from too few observations. Because evaluation is an inexact process, evaluation results are likely to be more valid if the evaluation utilizes (a) more observations (b) by more evaluators (c) focusing on more varied soccer situations. Coaches who see their players over time and in many soccer situations are less likely to suffer from bias, although they too have to watch out that their first impressions don’t cloud their judgments. And of course, it is helpful to get assessments beyond one or two coaches.
8. When players are either paired with, or are playing against, players who are unrepresentative of realistic competition. For example, players who are paired against really weak players may look strong in comparison. Players who are paired as teammates with really good players may look strong because of their teammates’ strong play. Finally, players who only have experience playing weaker players may not play well when being evaluated against stronger players even though they might be expected to improve by moving up and gaining experience with those same players.
9. When the wrong things are evaluated. Obviously, it’s critical to evaluate the right soccer skills. So for example, evaluating a player on how well he/she can pass to a stationary player is not as valid as seeing whether good passes are made in realistic game-like situations when players are moving around. The more game-like the situations, the better the evaluation.
10. When evaluations are done by remembering, not observing. Many coaches fill out their evaluation forms back home late at night instead of evaluating their players while observing them. The problem with this memory-based approach is that introduces huge biases into the process. First, memory is not perfect, so evaluators may not remember correctly. Second, memory is selective. We remember some things and forget others. Players must be evaluated primarily through observation, not memory.
11. Encouraging players to compare themselves to others. As coaches, one of our main goals is to help our players learn to develop their skills as players, as teammates, as people, and as thinkers. Unfortunately, when players focus on how well they are doing in comparison to others, they are less likely to focus on their own skill development. It is generally a mistake to use evaluations to encourage players to compare themselves to others. While players may be inclined to compare themselves to others, coaches can limit the negative effects of this by having each player focus on their own key competencies to improve.
12. Encouraging players to focus on how good they are overall, instead of having them focus on what they are good at and what they still have to work on. For our players to get better, they have to put effort into getting better. If they believe their skills are fixed and not easily changed, they will have no motivation to put any effort into their own improvement. Evaluations should be designed NOT to put kids in categories (except when absolutely necessary for team assignments and the like), but rather to show them what they need to work on to get better. As coaches, we should teach the importance of giving effort to deliberate practice, encouraging our players to refine and speed their best skills and improve on their weakest skills.
13. Encouraging players to focus on too many improvements at once. To help our players (a) avoid frustration, (b) avoid thinking of themselves as poor players, and (c) avoid overwhelming their ability to focus, we ought to have them only focus on a few major self-improvement goals at one time.

 

Feedback for Learners. Learn by Subscription Learning!!

Subscription Learning is one way to implement the spacing effect--one of the best ways to help people learn so they don't forget, so that they can actually remember what to do on the job.

The best way to experience subscription learning is to sign up for a subscription learning thread. With this in mind, I've created a free subscription-learning thread on how to give learners feedback.

You can check it out by clicking here.

Stop Using Slide Templates

Too many organizations insist on using slide templates (slide decorations) in their training slides and presentations. This is a bad idea, and I've created the following narrated slide deck to make a research-based case against these bedeviling adornments:

• On YouTube
• On Vimeo