FATAL ASSUMPTIONS IN LEARNING

September 23, 2013

Learning is often defined as, “the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, study, or by being taught.” Not sure I agree with all aspects of that definition — but, regardless, let’s deal with the subject as it relates to both education and training. And, we’ll start with education.

The philosophy and aims of an educational institution are concerned with the education of the whole person — mind, body, soul and emotion — and with the realization that knowledge is unimportant without the ability to communicate and exchange it. The Harvard Report on “General Education in a Free Society” placed first in its list of objectives “training in the ability to communicate orally and writing the results of thought.”

Ideally the purpose of an educational institution is to prepare a student to educate herself. An institution attempts to do this in three ways:

A. It exposes the student to philosophies, ideas and personalities (knowledge).
B. It teaches the skills the student needs to master in order to use his education and to continue his growth.
C. It provides opportunities for the student to begin producing creative or contributory products of her own stage of education.

Training, however, is a different horse. Its aim is to improve the skills necessary for job or personal activity performance. And, rightfully, the emphasis today for both training and education has shifted from the provider to the receiver — allowing us to better focus our attention on learning and the learner.

Since training is almost exclusively centered on skills acquisition, we can assume that the adult employees we encounter in our organizations are highly motivated to acquire the skills necessary for better job performance and the resultant monetary rewards. Most of them have failed to learn in a traditional classroom lecture/reading regimen and, along with their employers, are looking for a more effective way to learn.

Unfortunately, many trainers charged with the skills training challenges in their organizations are, mistakenly, assuming that their trainees already possess the foundational basic skills necessary for the more advanced job performance skills they teach.

Not true!

Yes, we’ve all heard a lot about the lack of basic skills in America’s workforce. But, have we all read about it? Approximately 35 million Americans can’t. They can’t even read this sentence. Estimates range that up to 85 million Americans cannot read at a level that would allow them to function fully in the workplace. The numbers are staggering.

And reading is not the only skill workers are lacking. Millions cannot perform the simple mathematical problems now required in their jobs. For example, many employees can neither use a calculator nor graph numbers.

For American industry, the problem first came to light more than two decades ago when many organizations were having difficulty trying to implement statistical process control (SPC). Many employees could not learn the new tasks required of them. Management began to ask, “why?”

The reason became rapidly apparent — the workforce lacked proficiency in the necessary 3 R’s (reading, writing and arithmetic). For the past couple of decades, this issue has been given a lot of press and a great deal of money. In response, many classes were formed and the focus shifted to address this basic skills shortage.

But are we any better off than we were? Not really. Small gains have been made but no dramatic changes. Recently, trainers began sitting back and looking at the methods that are being employed to teach those basic skills. They are beginning to reject traditional classroom training (lecture/reading) as a viable solution to the skills shortage and are turning instead to individualized, interactive multi-sensory media for answers.

While protecting the names of the organizations, here are a couple of the answers they have discovered:

“We have to increase the skill levels of our workforce because of rapidly changing technologies. We had determined that there was a serious literacy problem in our plant and had implemented classroom training as a solution. We quickly found that some of our employees did not thrive in that environment. In fact, they were embarrassed to be seen in a basic skills class. Most adults do not want their peers to know that they have a literacy problem, let alone know the extent of the problem. So we turned to interactive multi-sensory media to provide individualized, private training for these critical skills. Now, no one knows whether a worker is training on technical skills or basic skills. . . . We plan to implement more such training across the company, making basic skills training available to all employees.”

“The use of interactive multi-sensory media allows the student to interface with the computer and avoids placing the student in an embarrassing situation. These programs have provided us with a resource to train one-on-one effectively and have proven to be cost-effective. . . . Student performance is monitored and, as a result, we have seen as much as 60% improvement in the areas of comprehension, reading and writing skills.”

Improving basic skills training is a necessity today. Fully interactive multi-sensory learning (networked full motion video-based learning) is the best answer. If we want to improve on-the-job performance, the answers are at hand.