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Evidence-Informed Learning Design: Creating Training to Improve Performance
Learning and Development (L&D) programmes are too often based on fads, the latest trends or learning designers' personal preferences without critical evaluation. Evidence-Informed Learning Design allows learning professionals to move away from this type of approach by showing them how to assess and apply relevant scientific literature, learning science research and proven learning techniques to design their training in a way that will make a measurable difference to employee performance and overall business success.Packed with tips, tools and examples, Evidence-Informed Learning Design enables L&D and training professionals to save both time and money by ensuring that efforts are focused on designing learning that's proven to be effective. Covering techniques like interleaving and self-directed and self-regulated learning, as well as debunking myths and fallacies in the field, it covers how best to test, measure and reinforce learning in both online, offline and face-to-face scenarios. To ensure that employees develop the skills the business needs to succeed and that the L&D function is recognised as adding true organizational value, this book is essential reading for anyone responsible for designing learning.
313 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 3, 2020
32 people are currently reading
219 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 9, 2022
I’m glad I read this. I found the beginning a bit slow but the middle to later parts more exciting. I would’ve appreciated more detailed examples of workplace learning exercises that actually apply the principles they’re discussing, but I can see how that might’ve made an already long book too unwieldy. I do think this is a great refresher for anyone who has been teaching or designing learning experiences for a while, as it helped give me an updated mental framework for organizing the strategies I use (and helped me identify a few things I do that are not helpful/effective, oops). My one major complaint was that they used the word “however” constantly, and punctuated it in ways that were so consistently counter to the way I use it that I started thinking maybe it was a regional difference (American vs. European usage?). It drove me a little bit crazy, haha. But otherwise: good, useful book.
January 10, 2023
Take your learning experience design skills to the next level.
We live in a world with seemingly endless learning possibilities. Just a few decades ago, it would be difficult to imagine having such a huge amount of often free learning resources just a click of the mouse away.
But while learning has become more easily accessible, that doesn’t always extend to the workplace. Executives around the world bemoan lack of essential skills among employees, this endangering growth.
That’s where learning professionals come in. It’s their job to support employees to do better at their job and prepare them for future challenges. But the learning profession is still plagued with outdated and unscientific teaching methods. This, of course, leads to ineffective learning experiences for employees, as well as wasted time and money.
How can we solve this problem? Luckily, that’s the topic of this book. I’ll be taking you through some of the best methods available for designing effective learning experiences in the workplace. Whether it’s pedagogic principles or actionable suggestions, it’s all backed up by decades of research. And it’s sure to help you and your team become better learners.
---
Embracing an evidence-based approach and avoiding myths are key to designing learning experiences.
Before we dive into actionable techniques however, let’s begin with taking a look at how to judge sources when it comes to learning. After all, it’s likely this book is not going to be the last material on learning experience design you’ll encounter. Okay. Let’s dig in.
Say you’re tasked with creating a new learning design experience for your team. The goal is to prepare them for a new project which involves a lot of new information. You start coming up with ideas, but eventually hit a roadblock – you need some inspiration. Googling yields countless ideas, and most seem like they could provide useful inspiration for you to continue.
But some sources are better than others. When picking out studies or articles on learning, you need to adopt a prejudiced approach. Because not all materials are created equally.
So, what should you do? It’s all about adopting an evidence-based approach when courting materials. The first part of doing this involves avoiding the huge amount of myths surrounding learning. And as we’ll see shortly, there are a number of long-held assumptions about learning that are demonstrably false.
Take the “learning styles” myth, for example. It’s been around for a long time and is still widely believed to be true, no matter what the science says. The myth is, of course, that different people learn in different ways – some prefer reading, and others prefer listening to podcasts or watching videos. In the context of learning experience design, this myth often leads educators to providing parallel materials for different groups. This leads to spiraling costs for such learning experiences.
The learning styles myth is a great example of something that feels intuitively right while being completely wrong. So, if you’re considering using something “intuitively” right similar to learning styles, it’s best to take a moment to go beyond your intuition – and analyze your thinking process. In the case of learning styles, you might realize that what people want isn’t always good for them. Sure, most of us want to eat sugary or fatty food, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for us. It’s the same with learning styles. And multiple studies have shown that it either has no effect or even negative effects on learning outcomes.
Learning how to identify myths will put you on the right track to adopting an evidence-based approach for designing learning experiences. But it’s only one side of the coin. The other is being able to distinguish great learning materials from average ones.
Doing so doesn’t mean spending hours trawling through the sources of academic articles. It’s often the case that the language of what you’re reading will give you a pretty good idea. Let’s say you discover an article that claims to have discovered an effective new method to increase learning retention. The first thing you should do is check if it relies too much on vague or emotional language, both of which are red flags for potentially shoddy information. Also be wary if the author is excessively hyping up this new learning method before actually getting to explaining the method itself. The best resources rely on the power of their arguments without needing extra hype.
If the author’s language is sound and there’s no obvious hype, you can still do a bit of digging. For example, you can check the quality of the individual sources the article references. Are the sources published, preferably in peer-reviewed journals? Do the publishers of the journals have any obvious links to particular philosophies or products? These sorts of indicators will give you a solid idea whether the article is legit or not. If it passes these quick litmus tests, then the article’s findings are ready to be implemented into the next learning experience you’re designing.
---
Getting students to use the right tools is key for effective learning.
Alright. Now that you’re prepared to assess learning materials in the future, let’s get you hooked up with some of the most effective learning concepts around today. All these concepts belong to one of three groupings – tools, techniques, and ingredients. Just as master chefs use tools, techniques, and ingredients to whip up delicious food, learning professionals do the same when designing learning experiences. In doing so, we’re able to design learning experiences that are effective, efficient, and enjoyable.
Let’s start off by taking stock of the learning tools available to us. These can be anything that support the learning process, such as computers, books, or even this note, in fact. One tool that I want to highlight, though, is the noble pen and paper for the purpose of note-taking. Taking notes is of course invaluable for effective learning, but many of us aren’t doing it as effectively as we could.
These days, many of us turn up to training sessions with our laptop in hand, ready to churn out touch-typed notes. For those of us who grew up with computers, it’s likely we type more quickly than we write. We’re therefore able to write more notes.
However, scientists have proven that typing is not the most effective way to take notes – and is actually detrimental to learning. So, my recommendation to you is that when designing your next learning experience, make your training sessions a laptop-free zone. This is because handwriting forces us to think more about what we decide to notate.
With typing, we often transcribe what we hear without pausing to think about what we’re typing. Handwriting, being slower, helps us to cognitively process the information we’re writing down. This is because it forces us to find shorter and quicker ways to take notes, such as paraphrasing or summarizing, both of which assist with the learning process.
What’s more is that other studies show that laptops aren’t only bad for the owner – people sitting within its line of sight can become distracted, as they can see what’s happening on the screen. So consider recommending the classic pen and paper to the attendees of your next learning experience. It’s been a powerful learning tool for centuries, and isn’t going away anytime soon.
---
Applying effective learning techniques will help bring your learning experiences to the next level.
Once you’ve figured out what sorts of tools are most effective for your next learning experience, it’s time to take a look at what sort of techniques you can use. Techniques consist of methods that you as an educator use to facilitate the learning process, such as collaborative learning, direct instruction, or lectures.
Perhaps one of the most effective learning techniques is providing feedback to learners. In fact, countless studies have shown that feedback is a powerful intervention when it comes to learning. Not only can it have a positive effect on learning outcomes – it’s also been shown to increase motivation.
But not all feedback is created equally. So, to make sure you’re giving the most effective feedback possible to your learners, let’s go over the basics.
Let’s get started with corrective feedback. This consists of giving the learner the correct answer. It’s the most common type of feedback, but not the most effective. Instead, try to always give epistemic feedback to your learners. Rather than telling them how they can do better, question how they came to their original answer. Then, provide them with just enough information that they themselves can figure out the correct answer. This might sound like “You’ve made a mistake in this step. But if you consider x, how would you do it differently? Are there any other ways you could do it that might lead to a different result?”
Epistemic feedback is all about engaging the learner to confront their mistakes in a constructive way. Instead of simply providing the correct answer, you allow them to reach the correct answer themselves. And this is a much more effective way to learn.
As educators, we mustn’t only strive to give good feedback – we need to actively avoid giving bad feedback. This is easier said than done. Studies show that generic praise can be detrimental to learning outcomes. Although it may intuitively seem like a nice thing to do, it can decrease intrinsic motivation that learners need to reach their learning goals. So make sure to only praise specific or exceptional aspects of your learners’ work.
And finally, be careful not to engage with feedback that can lower a learner’s self-esteem. This can take the form of publishing student rankings, where you compare their progress to others. In addition to decreasing motivation and self-esteem, rankings can cause anxiety in learners. So all in all, it’s best to avoid such forms of feedback.
---
Choosing the right ingredients will get your students closer to learning success.
So, now that we’ve explored some of the best tools and techniques out there, let’s dive into the final component of designing effective learning experiences – picking the right ingredients. For many educators, this is often where we go wrong. It can be tricky to pick the best ingredients, or learning strategies, for the specific learning outcomes we want to achieve.
Psychologists and educators have been evaluating different learning strategies for over 100 years. And while many ineffective ones have been discarded, some remain with us today. Let’s look at three of them.
A classic learning strategy is memorizing – it still occupies a dominant position in many school systems around the world today. But it’s been proven over and over again that it doesn’t help improve our memory or learning in general at all.
The same can be said about highlighting or underlining. It’s a widely practiced learning strategy that many people think assists with their learning. Spoiler – it doesn’t. It usually results in us either highlighting too much, or even simply highlighting the wrong things. This can be detrimental to learning.
It’s a similar story with re-reading. Although it can help us memorize a text, it doesn’t help us understand it. What’s more is that it can give learners a false sense of having learned something. This is because when they read something a second time and recognize the information, they assume that they themselves have learned it.
So, with those three ineffective learning strategies out of the way, what are some examples of effective learning strategies that you can promote to your students?
Possibly one of the most effective learning strategies backed up by science is spaced repetition. This involves learners repeatedly recalling information over time rather than cramming it all in at once. How does this work? Well, by taking one or even two days break after a learning session, the information learned already shifts to the long-term memory. So, if after those two days you retrieve the information from your long-term memory, you strengthen what’s called the “memory trace” associated with the information. Doing this on a regular basis helps us forget less and learn more.
So, how can you as an educator facilitate spaced learning for your students? Well, one effective way is to zealously dish out assignments for your students to complete. The most important thing to keep in mind is the time between first presenting a concept to students and asking them to recall it. While you’ll want to assign homework on the same day you teach a topic, you’ll want to assign work on the topic after your next session, too. That way, students will have to recall the information from their long-term memory, thus strengthening their learning outcomes.
---
Fostering expert learners is the most important part of a learning professional’s job.
You now have an expanded arsenal of tools, techniques, and ingredients to implement into your learning design experiences. Let’s now look at the last building block needed to help you and your team with your learning goals. This is the cultivation of expert learners at your organization. The goal here is to create self-directed and self-regulated learners that are able to take control of their learning development outside of formal instruction.
The benefits of having a team of expert learners are many. For starters, their knowledge is more well-organized than novice learners, and they’re able to apply it with ease. They’re already aware of effective learning strategies like spaced learning, and they are highly motivated to always learn more. And of course, they’re proven to be more valuable to your company.
So, how can you help your team members become expert learners? Well, luck has it that you’re probably already doing so via the learning experiences you’re designing for them. By helping them to accumulate knowledge and learning strategies over time, the more self-regulated and self-directed they’ll become. Once this process begins, it tends to get better exponentially – after all, the more self-regulated and self-directed a learner becomes, the better they are at increasing their knowledge.
Luckily, there’s more you can do to help your team members reach learning expertise. One way to do this is collaborating with supervisors. You might sit down with an employee and their supervisor to figure out the employee’s learning goals and how they plan to achieve them, for example.
You can also provide self-assessment tools so that they can better monitor their learning along the way. This might involve getting them to regularly reflect on questions like “how do your personal learning goals align with the company’s business goals?” or “how does goal x help with your overall learning trajectory?”
In these sessions, you might want to check in with your learners’ beliefs about their ability to achieve goals. Some learners have low self-esteem based on experiences with learning in the past. Perhaps they had a bad experience where they were looked down upon for making mistakes while learning. If this were the case, you’d let them know that mistakes are actually helpful for the learning process, and that they shouldn’t worry about being penalized for them again.
Perhaps the best way to get learners to become more self-regulated is to recommend them to set up their own personal learning network, or PLN. This should consist of colleagues, superiors, friends and other people with different perspectives. The learner should seek out people with similar values. They should also be passionate about the learner’s goals.
Having a PLN on hand to share progress with or provide inspiration and feedback when needed is an incredibly self-empowering tool for learners. And it’s also great for companies – with so much work these days having become cross-disciplinary, it’s important to involve people with as many perspectives as possible. Only with such a wide perspective can your learners help solve novel problems going into the future.
At the end of the day, designing learning experiences can only get learners so far. But by helping to instill a lifelong love of learning, you’ll be enabling your students to get ahead in both their professional and private lives.
---
It’s important to scrutinize all sources to do with learning before implementing their findings in your work. To do so, identify possible myths, as well as checking the language that’s too vague, emotional, or hyped up. Once you’ve done so, you can begin assembling your tools, techniques, and ingredients to help design your next learning experience. Tools such as the pen and paper are much better than laptops for note-taking. Techniques like giving epistemic feedback are guaranteed to increase motivation and assist in learning outcomes. And ingredients like spaced learning have been proven to assist in learning. Finally, foster a learning environment that promotes expert learning among your students. Get them set up a personal learning network to help them help themselves with their learning.
And here’s some more actionable advice: Get your students to start a flashcard deck to assist with spaced learning.
When designing your next learning experience, consider getting your students to keep a deck of flashcards for use throughout the entire course. Language learners probably know this learning strategy from vocabulary flashcards that you do every day for ten to fifteen minutes. But the same technique can be applied to larger amounts of information too. A flashcard deck might have a general concept on one side, and a whole paragraph of information to retrieve on the other. This information might consist of facts learners need to remember, or concepts to understand and apply.
We live in a world with seemingly endless learning possibilities. Just a few decades ago, it would be difficult to imagine having such a huge amount of often free learning resources just a click of the mouse away.
But while learning has become more easily accessible, that doesn’t always extend to the workplace. Executives around the world bemoan lack of essential skills among employees, this endangering growth.
That’s where learning professionals come in. It’s their job to support employees to do better at their job and prepare them for future challenges. But the learning profession is still plagued with outdated and unscientific teaching methods. This, of course, leads to ineffective learning experiences for employees, as well as wasted time and money.
How can we solve this problem? Luckily, that’s the topic of this book. I’ll be taking you through some of the best methods available for designing effective learning experiences in the workplace. Whether it’s pedagogic principles or actionable suggestions, it’s all backed up by decades of research. And it’s sure to help you and your team become better learners.
---
Embracing an evidence-based approach and avoiding myths are key to designing learning experiences.
Before we dive into actionable techniques however, let’s begin with taking a look at how to judge sources when it comes to learning. After all, it’s likely this book is not going to be the last material on learning experience design you’ll encounter. Okay. Let’s dig in.
Say you’re tasked with creating a new learning design experience for your team. The goal is to prepare them for a new project which involves a lot of new information. You start coming up with ideas, but eventually hit a roadblock – you need some inspiration. Googling yields countless ideas, and most seem like they could provide useful inspiration for you to continue.
But some sources are better than others. When picking out studies or articles on learning, you need to adopt a prejudiced approach. Because not all materials are created equally.
So, what should you do? It’s all about adopting an evidence-based approach when courting materials. The first part of doing this involves avoiding the huge amount of myths surrounding learning. And as we’ll see shortly, there are a number of long-held assumptions about learning that are demonstrably false.
Take the “learning styles” myth, for example. It’s been around for a long time and is still widely believed to be true, no matter what the science says. The myth is, of course, that different people learn in different ways – some prefer reading, and others prefer listening to podcasts or watching videos. In the context of learning experience design, this myth often leads educators to providing parallel materials for different groups. This leads to spiraling costs for such learning experiences.
The learning styles myth is a great example of something that feels intuitively right while being completely wrong. So, if you’re considering using something “intuitively” right similar to learning styles, it’s best to take a moment to go beyond your intuition – and analyze your thinking process. In the case of learning styles, you might realize that what people want isn’t always good for them. Sure, most of us want to eat sugary or fatty food, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for us. It’s the same with learning styles. And multiple studies have shown that it either has no effect or even negative effects on learning outcomes.
Learning how to identify myths will put you on the right track to adopting an evidence-based approach for designing learning experiences. But it’s only one side of the coin. The other is being able to distinguish great learning materials from average ones.
Doing so doesn’t mean spending hours trawling through the sources of academic articles. It’s often the case that the language of what you’re reading will give you a pretty good idea. Let’s say you discover an article that claims to have discovered an effective new method to increase learning retention. The first thing you should do is check if it relies too much on vague or emotional language, both of which are red flags for potentially shoddy information. Also be wary if the author is excessively hyping up this new learning method before actually getting to explaining the method itself. The best resources rely on the power of their arguments without needing extra hype.
If the author’s language is sound and there’s no obvious hype, you can still do a bit of digging. For example, you can check the quality of the individual sources the article references. Are the sources published, preferably in peer-reviewed journals? Do the publishers of the journals have any obvious links to particular philosophies or products? These sorts of indicators will give you a solid idea whether the article is legit or not. If it passes these quick litmus tests, then the article’s findings are ready to be implemented into the next learning experience you’re designing.
---
Getting students to use the right tools is key for effective learning.
Alright. Now that you’re prepared to assess learning materials in the future, let’s get you hooked up with some of the most effective learning concepts around today. All these concepts belong to one of three groupings – tools, techniques, and ingredients. Just as master chefs use tools, techniques, and ingredients to whip up delicious food, learning professionals do the same when designing learning experiences. In doing so, we’re able to design learning experiences that are effective, efficient, and enjoyable.
Let’s start off by taking stock of the learning tools available to us. These can be anything that support the learning process, such as computers, books, or even this note, in fact. One tool that I want to highlight, though, is the noble pen and paper for the purpose of note-taking. Taking notes is of course invaluable for effective learning, but many of us aren’t doing it as effectively as we could.
These days, many of us turn up to training sessions with our laptop in hand, ready to churn out touch-typed notes. For those of us who grew up with computers, it’s likely we type more quickly than we write. We’re therefore able to write more notes.
However, scientists have proven that typing is not the most effective way to take notes – and is actually detrimental to learning. So, my recommendation to you is that when designing your next learning experience, make your training sessions a laptop-free zone. This is because handwriting forces us to think more about what we decide to notate.
With typing, we often transcribe what we hear without pausing to think about what we’re typing. Handwriting, being slower, helps us to cognitively process the information we’re writing down. This is because it forces us to find shorter and quicker ways to take notes, such as paraphrasing or summarizing, both of which assist with the learning process.
What’s more is that other studies show that laptops aren’t only bad for the owner – people sitting within its line of sight can become distracted, as they can see what’s happening on the screen. So consider recommending the classic pen and paper to the attendees of your next learning experience. It’s been a powerful learning tool for centuries, and isn’t going away anytime soon.
---
Applying effective learning techniques will help bring your learning experiences to the next level.
Once you’ve figured out what sorts of tools are most effective for your next learning experience, it’s time to take a look at what sort of techniques you can use. Techniques consist of methods that you as an educator use to facilitate the learning process, such as collaborative learning, direct instruction, or lectures.
Perhaps one of the most effective learning techniques is providing feedback to learners. In fact, countless studies have shown that feedback is a powerful intervention when it comes to learning. Not only can it have a positive effect on learning outcomes – it’s also been shown to increase motivation.
But not all feedback is created equally. So, to make sure you’re giving the most effective feedback possible to your learners, let’s go over the basics.
Let’s get started with corrective feedback. This consists of giving the learner the correct answer. It’s the most common type of feedback, but not the most effective. Instead, try to always give epistemic feedback to your learners. Rather than telling them how they can do better, question how they came to their original answer. Then, provide them with just enough information that they themselves can figure out the correct answer. This might sound like “You’ve made a mistake in this step. But if you consider x, how would you do it differently? Are there any other ways you could do it that might lead to a different result?”
Epistemic feedback is all about engaging the learner to confront their mistakes in a constructive way. Instead of simply providing the correct answer, you allow them to reach the correct answer themselves. And this is a much more effective way to learn.
As educators, we mustn’t only strive to give good feedback – we need to actively avoid giving bad feedback. This is easier said than done. Studies show that generic praise can be detrimental to learning outcomes. Although it may intuitively seem like a nice thing to do, it can decrease intrinsic motivation that learners need to reach their learning goals. So make sure to only praise specific or exceptional aspects of your learners’ work.
And finally, be careful not to engage with feedback that can lower a learner’s self-esteem. This can take the form of publishing student rankings, where you compare their progress to others. In addition to decreasing motivation and self-esteem, rankings can cause anxiety in learners. So all in all, it’s best to avoid such forms of feedback.
---
Choosing the right ingredients will get your students closer to learning success.
So, now that we’ve explored some of the best tools and techniques out there, let’s dive into the final component of designing effective learning experiences – picking the right ingredients. For many educators, this is often where we go wrong. It can be tricky to pick the best ingredients, or learning strategies, for the specific learning outcomes we want to achieve.
Psychologists and educators have been evaluating different learning strategies for over 100 years. And while many ineffective ones have been discarded, some remain with us today. Let’s look at three of them.
A classic learning strategy is memorizing – it still occupies a dominant position in many school systems around the world today. But it’s been proven over and over again that it doesn’t help improve our memory or learning in general at all.
The same can be said about highlighting or underlining. It’s a widely practiced learning strategy that many people think assists with their learning. Spoiler – it doesn’t. It usually results in us either highlighting too much, or even simply highlighting the wrong things. This can be detrimental to learning.
It’s a similar story with re-reading. Although it can help us memorize a text, it doesn’t help us understand it. What’s more is that it can give learners a false sense of having learned something. This is because when they read something a second time and recognize the information, they assume that they themselves have learned it.
So, with those three ineffective learning strategies out of the way, what are some examples of effective learning strategies that you can promote to your students?
Possibly one of the most effective learning strategies backed up by science is spaced repetition. This involves learners repeatedly recalling information over time rather than cramming it all in at once. How does this work? Well, by taking one or even two days break after a learning session, the information learned already shifts to the long-term memory. So, if after those two days you retrieve the information from your long-term memory, you strengthen what’s called the “memory trace” associated with the information. Doing this on a regular basis helps us forget less and learn more.
So, how can you as an educator facilitate spaced learning for your students? Well, one effective way is to zealously dish out assignments for your students to complete. The most important thing to keep in mind is the time between first presenting a concept to students and asking them to recall it. While you’ll want to assign homework on the same day you teach a topic, you’ll want to assign work on the topic after your next session, too. That way, students will have to recall the information from their long-term memory, thus strengthening their learning outcomes.
---
Fostering expert learners is the most important part of a learning professional’s job.
You now have an expanded arsenal of tools, techniques, and ingredients to implement into your learning design experiences. Let’s now look at the last building block needed to help you and your team with your learning goals. This is the cultivation of expert learners at your organization. The goal here is to create self-directed and self-regulated learners that are able to take control of their learning development outside of formal instruction.
The benefits of having a team of expert learners are many. For starters, their knowledge is more well-organized than novice learners, and they’re able to apply it with ease. They’re already aware of effective learning strategies like spaced learning, and they are highly motivated to always learn more. And of course, they’re proven to be more valuable to your company.
So, how can you help your team members become expert learners? Well, luck has it that you’re probably already doing so via the learning experiences you’re designing for them. By helping them to accumulate knowledge and learning strategies over time, the more self-regulated and self-directed they’ll become. Once this process begins, it tends to get better exponentially – after all, the more self-regulated and self-directed a learner becomes, the better they are at increasing their knowledge.
Luckily, there’s more you can do to help your team members reach learning expertise. One way to do this is collaborating with supervisors. You might sit down with an employee and their supervisor to figure out the employee’s learning goals and how they plan to achieve them, for example.
You can also provide self-assessment tools so that they can better monitor their learning along the way. This might involve getting them to regularly reflect on questions like “how do your personal learning goals align with the company’s business goals?” or “how does goal x help with your overall learning trajectory?”
In these sessions, you might want to check in with your learners’ beliefs about their ability to achieve goals. Some learners have low self-esteem based on experiences with learning in the past. Perhaps they had a bad experience where they were looked down upon for making mistakes while learning. If this were the case, you’d let them know that mistakes are actually helpful for the learning process, and that they shouldn’t worry about being penalized for them again.
Perhaps the best way to get learners to become more self-regulated is to recommend them to set up their own personal learning network, or PLN. This should consist of colleagues, superiors, friends and other people with different perspectives. The learner should seek out people with similar values. They should also be passionate about the learner’s goals.
Having a PLN on hand to share progress with or provide inspiration and feedback when needed is an incredibly self-empowering tool for learners. And it’s also great for companies – with so much work these days having become cross-disciplinary, it’s important to involve people with as many perspectives as possible. Only with such a wide perspective can your learners help solve novel problems going into the future.
At the end of the day, designing learning experiences can only get learners so far. But by helping to instill a lifelong love of learning, you’ll be enabling your students to get ahead in both their professional and private lives.
---
It’s important to scrutinize all sources to do with learning before implementing their findings in your work. To do so, identify possible myths, as well as checking the language that’s too vague, emotional, or hyped up. Once you’ve done so, you can begin assembling your tools, techniques, and ingredients to help design your next learning experience. Tools such as the pen and paper are much better than laptops for note-taking. Techniques like giving epistemic feedback are guaranteed to increase motivation and assist in learning outcomes. And ingredients like spaced learning have been proven to assist in learning. Finally, foster a learning environment that promotes expert learning among your students. Get them set up a personal learning network to help them help themselves with their learning.
And here’s some more actionable advice: Get your students to start a flashcard deck to assist with spaced learning.
When designing your next learning experience, consider getting your students to keep a deck of flashcards for use throughout the entire course. Language learners probably know this learning strategy from vocabulary flashcards that you do every day for ten to fifteen minutes. But the same technique can be applied to larger amounts of information too. A flashcard deck might have a general concept on one side, and a whole paragraph of information to retrieve on the other. This information might consist of facts learners need to remember, or concepts to understand and apply.
April 5, 2020
Evidence-Informed Learning Design: Creating Training to Improve Performance by Mirjam Neelen and Paul A. Kirschner argues that talent development professionals should rely on what's known in learning science and not what's the latest fad in corporate training. The publisher gave me the opportunity to read this book prior to publication, but the review is completely my own.
First, I completely agree with Neelen and Kirschner's general tenet that often fads drive what happens in corporate learning programs. Second, I also agree that talent development professionals should look to learning science as a way to improve learning experiences and learning outcomes. However, I don't necessarily agree that this is a new concept or that the profession is "immature," because " "The main reason is that we’re insufficiently aware of the evidence we can draw upon to design great learning experiences. Another reason is that sometimes we don’t know how to judge the available evidence." Admittedly, I'm a university professor who specializes in talent development and has written a textbook in this area myself. As a longtime member of both the Association for Talent Development and the International Society for Performance Improvement, I've heard discussions about evidence-based learning practices for a long time now.
Beyond this area of contention, I think the book is pretty good. One of the parts I really liked about the book, which is different from similar books on this topic, is that they do talk about evaluating research. I really appreciated the discussion that not all research is the same and that it's important to differentiate between high- and low-quality research.
Probably my favorite feature of the book are the numerous case studies integrated to really help readers fully understand and apply the book's content. Often books like this are focused on the research and not necessarily demonstrating how this could be applied to real-world learning scenarios.
Overall, I think this is a book and would recommend to anyone either studying talent development academically or is working in the industry. There is a lot of great information within this book that can definitely improve learning outcomes, which should be the goal of any talent development professional.
First, I completely agree with Neelen and Kirschner's general tenet that often fads drive what happens in corporate learning programs. Second, I also agree that talent development professionals should look to learning science as a way to improve learning experiences and learning outcomes. However, I don't necessarily agree that this is a new concept or that the profession is "immature," because " "The main reason is that we’re insufficiently aware of the evidence we can draw upon to design great learning experiences. Another reason is that sometimes we don’t know how to judge the available evidence." Admittedly, I'm a university professor who specializes in talent development and has written a textbook in this area myself. As a longtime member of both the Association for Talent Development and the International Society for Performance Improvement, I've heard discussions about evidence-based learning practices for a long time now.
Beyond this area of contention, I think the book is pretty good. One of the parts I really liked about the book, which is different from similar books on this topic, is that they do talk about evaluating research. I really appreciated the discussion that not all research is the same and that it's important to differentiate between high- and low-quality research.
Probably my favorite feature of the book are the numerous case studies integrated to really help readers fully understand and apply the book's content. Often books like this are focused on the research and not necessarily demonstrating how this could be applied to real-world learning scenarios.
Overall, I think this is a book and would recommend to anyone either studying talent development academically or is working in the industry. There is a lot of great information within this book that can definitely improve learning outcomes, which should be the goal of any talent development professional.
January 23, 2020
These books are amazing: they're useful, well written and full of ideas for anyone working in L&D.
It was an informative read that I strongly recommend.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.
It was an informative read that I strongly recommend.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.
December 18, 2021
It's a good book overall, just didn't read as something new. As it's always good to return to the same concepts from different angles, I didn't complain too much. Picked up a couple techniques I hadn't heard of before, otherwise didn't find out much new.
August 14, 2022
An excellent read for learning designers who want to build effective, high quality learning experiences based on the science of learning.
October 9, 2023
Promotes 1) pen and paper (v. typing), 2) Spaced repetition learning, 3) Personal learning network (PLN) and the 4) passion for continous learning.
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