No pain, more gain? Research supports "less learning more often"

Many years back, I coined a phrase that neatly summarised my view on how to change current training design and delivery practice so that it can dramatically improve effective learning and performance. My phrase?

"Less learning more often" 

(click to read the full article)

Is it happening? Well, it's beginning to it seems. We are clearly recognising that the concentrated, content-heavy course delivery model often fails to transfer effectively to competent performance in the workplace. A new approach that favours little and often, campaign over course, interwoven activities is, counter to many people's current beliefs, far more effective. Not only that, new research at Northwestern University suggests this new way of training could reduce by at least half the effort previously thought necessary to make learning gains.

The research also may be the first behavioral demonstration of meta-plasticity, the idea that experiences that on their own do not generate learning can influence how effective later experiences are at generating learning.

"Prior to our work much of the research into perceptual learning could be summed up as 'no pain, no gain,'" says Beverly Wright, first author of a study in the Sept. 22 Journal of Neuroscience and communication sciences and disorders professor at Northwestern. "Our work suggests that you can have the same gain in learning with substantially less pain."

The Northwestern researchers found that robust learning occurred when they combined periods of practice that alone were too brief to cause learning with periods of mere exposure to perceptual stimuli. "To our surprise, we found that two 'wrongs' actually can make a right when it comes to perceptual learning," says Wright. What's more, they found that the combination led to perceptual learning gains that were equal to the learning gains made by participants who performed twice as much continuous task training (training which by nature of its repetition and length often is onerous).

The findings hold potential for members of the general population with an interest in enhancing perceptual abilities -- for musicians seeking to sharpen their sensitivity to sound, people studying a second language or physicians learning to tell the difference between regular and irregular heartbeats.

This is great news for my me and my son as it means our intuitive, supposedly "lazy" approach to guitar practice, appears to be pretty effective!

 In my own article I referred to some earlier research which supports this further:

Back in 2001, the American Psychological Association published (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 2001, Vol. 27, No. 4) some interesting research. It concluded that practicing different skills in concentrated blocks is not the most efficient way to learn. While focusing on a particular skill leads to a short term boost in performance during the period of training, this leads people to over-estimate how well they learned the skill they practiced and results in poorer long term learning. This has the potential to fool trainers and trainees into believing that the apparent progress made during the training will be sustained in future performance back in the job. In fact, for long-term retention, practicing skills that are mixed with other tasks (contextual-interference practice as the researchers call it) results in better learning.

This has far reaching implications for most training design. It clearly points away from focused training on single skills and concentrated repetitive practice and suggests we design learning experiences that are deliberately interwoven among other tasks, requiring people to actively recall and then practice the new skill over longer time intervals.

As we acquire a better understanding of these learning processes perhaps the wider L & D world will be able to bite the bullet and accept that a more fundamental change in approach is needed. And hey, it looks like learning these new ways may be less effort than you first thought.

Back in blog seat - it's getting lively out there...

It's been a while - 6 months in fact - since I last posted on this blog. This is largely due to lots of activity in the day job and a preference for Twitter as a platform for comment and sharing of useful links etc... (you can follow me on here). I've also published a number of articles in printed journals/magazines and been remiss in posting up here due to the now confusing delay between writing and publication (so much more instant online but you know that already).

Anyhow, I am back in the blog seat and will start with referencing a couple of recent posts from Charles Jennings and Donald Clark. Charles tackles an important point about the difference between instructional design and interactivity design and its effect on long term learning and performance support. Donald lays out some techniques to tackle the longstanding poor levels of retention that result from most learning/training activities.

I've been promoting these ideas for some time and thought it would be useful to supplement these recent posts with some still very relevant articles I wrote dating back to 2006 when I put forward the concept of "Less Learning More Often" while in the US with Charles and many discussions with Donald over the years.

Links are below and would welcome your comments as usual.


Less Learning More Often

Transfer of Learning - Missing in Action

Ubiquitious Performance Support

Also a slide deck that promotes consideration of the spacing effect:

Lars Hyland Webinar 090709 Re-inventing the E-learning Experience

Higher Education embracing change

Last week I was invited to speak to all the teaching staff at City College, a higher education institution in Brighton, UK, which in its own words:

Each year over 2,000 full-time learners, 13,000 part-time learners as well as many international and European students choose City College as their education provider.

The main thrust of my presentation was to stimulate a recognition that the connected world we now live in forces a deep reassessment of traditional teaching practices. Michael Wesch and his Vision of Students Today helped set a context for how learners views, context and behaviour has changed as a result of the every day technology they use. Meantime Father Guido Sarduci demonstrated the elephant in the room in most education and training activities - we forget most of what we are presented with.

I went on to explore the principles of follow-through, and how in an age where we can have constant, mobile access to the internet, with all its knowledge repositories and applications, we can now design education and training to support us when we learn rather than when we are expected to learn (two fundamentally different things).

The economics of knowledge acquisition and skills development have changed. We can, as I like to say: Learn Less, More Often.

The Five Minute University

Harold Jarche referenced this delicious video clip of Father Guido Sarduci pointing out what we all know about traditional schooling and higher education - we forget most of it. So what is the net value to us and society in perpetuating a model that is plainly inefficient, especially when the connected world we live in now fundamentally changes the economics on which that model was based.

As I've said before in one of my original posts to this blog: Less Learning, More Often is a conceptual framework that goes someway to address this chasm.

By the way - get to the end of the clip. The legal profession is vastly over engineered and at some point must undergo disruptive change once we remove the archaic language and democratise access to the computer systems and databases that many lawyers rely on anyway. E-learning can play a big role in helping society better understand the laws of the land.

Learning is a health issue

I'm playing a bit of catch up after a particularly busy month - although the way things are looking that'll be the pattern for the foreseeable future. The European e-learning market appears to be thriving in stark contrast to the ongoing financial crisis and what looks like an inevitable recession in the US. As I raised in an early post - training budget shock - e-learning is now very much a mainstream option for training delivery and as general budgets tighten and cost efficiency returns to the fore (did it ever really go away?), the obvious benefits of making available persistent, consistent and trackable learning content are now fully accepted. The question has moved on from "Why e-learning?" to "Why not e-learning?". But the wider context is one recognising the ongoing and growing need to learn, train and re-train in order to stay relevant in a fast changing global economy.

The old...

In some respects, you could say that the world of Education and Health are beginning to converge. The relatively new fields of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and other studies of brain behaviour is starting to stray firmly into the more fluffy world of learning. This means we can start to view education as a brain health issue. This thought was triggered by a recent report by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) reporting that rates of cognitive impairment among older Americans are on the decline, with education associated with better cognitive health.

The data comes from the NIA-supported Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a national, longitudinal examination of health, retirement and economic conditions of more than 20,000 men and women over 50. Researchers tested memory and judgment of a large subset of HRS participants to determine cognitive status in two groups of people, those age 70 and older in 1993 and in 2002. The scientists then followed each group for two years to track death rates.

They also looked at levels of education, income, and other factors in each group, finding that the 2002 participants were wealthier and had significantly higher levels of education, with 17 percent college-educated compared to 13 percent in 1993. The analysis found:

Cognitive impairment dropped from 12.2 percent in 1993 to 8.7 percent in 2002 among people 70 and older.
Cognitive impairment was associated with a significantly higher risk of death in both cohorts.
Education and financial status appeared overall to protect against developing cognitive impairment.
Once older people with higher levels of education reached a threshold of moderate to severe cognitive impairment, they had an increased risk of death over the next 2 years compared to those with lower levels of education.

While health treatment has improved for stroke, heart disease, and vascular conditions the researchers also suggest that cognitive reserve - our mind's resilience to neurological damage - may explain why the higher level of education found in the 2002 study group may be influencing the lower rate of cognitive impairment.

The New...

A commercial sign of this convergence between health and education is the growing industry in brain fitness, largely triggered by Nintendo's Brain Training success on the DS and Wii. Much of this is opportunistic bandwaggoning. However there are some exciting developments in Scotland which are reporting real benefits in the use of brain training exercises in a school setting.

A study in Dundee led by Learning and Teaching Scotland, as reporting by the Times, found:

“The initial pilot project that used the Nintendo DS and Dr Kawashima produced fascinating results," Derek Robertson, a development officer for 'games-based learning' at the LTS, said.
“Not only was there a marked and significant improvement in attainment in mental maths but there was also an improvement in concentration levels, behaviour and self regulation in the learning process.” Over a 10-week period, students in years 5 and 6 at St Columba's Primary played a series of 'brain training games' – including reading tests, problem-solving exercises, and memory puzzles – for 20 minutes in the morning when classes began. In a maths test at the end of the trial, their performance improved by an average 10 per cent, and the time to complete the test also dropped from 17 minutes to 13 minutes and nine seconds. Some children halved the time it took to complete the test while either maintaining or improving their score, the study found.

This is more evidence of Less Learning More Often at work. The success is leading to an extension of the study to 16 more schools - buying 480 Nintendo DS consoles for £34,000. This a small investment given the potential return, even if you scale it up across the entire country. Compare this to the billions wasted by Governments on over-engineered support structures that attempt to prop up the traditional methods of learning support to little lasting effect. Learning Skills Councils come to mind but there are plenty of others littering recent history - I only mention these as the Government announces their closure in 2010.

If we start to view education and our capacity to learn as a social health issue, perhaps we will see better targetted funding and real analytical rigour becoming commonplace rather than the exception it is today.

Upbeat Learning Technologies 2008

I spent last week in London at Learning Technologies Exhibition and Conference. The general mood amongst the vendors and attendees I felt demonstrated a confidence in the future at odds with the wider economic gloom that the media and city types would have us believe. While the longer term impact of globalisation and an overstretched financial sector will clearly affect us all, I wonder if we might just see a change to the normal budget-slashing that the training industry usually suffers in a downturn.

The skills agenda appears to have genuinely captured attention at board level, while the role that technology can play to improve efficiency and effectiveness of training and development is now undeniable.

I delivered a seminar on my "Less Learning More Often" theme which attracted a good crowd and, I'm pleased to say, favourable responses. I am still surprised by the lack of awareness the training world has of even basic cognitive research. Just recognising the limitations of our short term memory, how easy it is to overload learners with too much extraneous content, and making appropriate use of a variety of media in our design solutions (whether for delivery in the classroom or through the screen).

Itiel Dror, Senior Lecturer, Cognitive Neuroscience at Southampton University delivered a great keynote in the Conference covering a similar theme using robust examples of how easy it is for our brains and memory systems to be misled and confused. These principles, if not taken into consideration in our learning design, work against us and result in much weaker learning outcomes. Itiel does well to grab attention - always helps when you have a real brain in a jar to pull out of your bag!

Here's to 2008 building on the successes of last year and a further growth in organisations demanding higher quality e-learning solutions.

Snooze and Learn Faster

A recent study has found that a ninety minute daytime nap helps speed up the process of long term memory consolidation.

The group that slept in the afternoon showed a distinct improvement in their task performance by that evening, as opposed to the group that stayed awake, which did not exhibit any improvement. Following an entire night's sleep, both groups exhibited the same skill level.

The study indicated that the brain could successfully consolidate new memories in a 90 minute period rather than the normal 6-8 hour overnight sleep. So our international friends that love their siestas may well be learning faster and forgetting less than those of us who stay up and only sleep for one session a day.

Perhaps we'll see some brave face to face trainers including an enforced "sleep break" into the day's agenda to take advantage of this effect. Another example of the positive effects of less learning more often!

Less Learning More Often - original article

As mentioned in the previous post, here is an article I wrote back in December 2006 but it's interesting to see how relevant it feels now on re-reading:

--------------------------------------------------

It’s been said before, but I think we’ve forgotten. We are programmed to forget. So we need reminding. Regularly.

As learning and development professionals, designing and delivering training within our organisations, we avoid confronting the fact that most of our efforts are quickly forgotten and remain unapplied. We continue to design training as discrete events with little or no follow through. We ask people to attend one/two/three day training courses and then expect them to put this into practice back in the job. Indeed, most e-learning ends up being consumed as a single hit session of one/two/three hours with little additional support.

Why do we continue to allow this to happen? In a word – habit. Our expectations are neatly aligned – management, trainers and trainees expect their training to be delivered and received in this way. So it becomes the path of least resistance. The painful irony is that this is at odds with the way we actually learn most effectively. Like any addiction, we know the cure but find it too painful to change.

But we are going to have to. The pressures of global competition are rising and will soon overcome entrenched views. Likewise, technology is now mature, prevalent and cheap enough to support a new economic model for learning in the workplace. So what will this new model look like? In a phrase: Less Learning, More Often.

Short term gain, long term pain

Back in 2001, the American Psychological Association published (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 2001, Vol. 27, No. 4) some interesting research. It concluded that practicing different skills in concentrated blocks is not the most efficient way to learn. While focusing on a particular skill leads to a short term boost in performance during the period of training, this leads people to over-estimate how well they learned the skill they practiced and results in poorer long term learning. This has the potential to fool trainers and trainees into believing that the apparent progress made during the training will be sustained in future performance back in the job. In fact, for long-term retention, practicing skills that are mixed with other tasks (contextual-interference practice as the researchers call it) results in better learning.

This has far reaching implications for most training design. It clearly points away from focused training on single skills and concentrated repetitive practice and suggests we design learning experiences that are deliberately interwoven among other tasks, requiring people to actively recall and then practice the new skill over longer time intervals.

The spacing effect

An experiment conducted by the UK Post Office (now Royal Mail) in the 1970s also observed this effect. Employees training to operate new sorting machines were split into three groups. Group 1 completed their training in one continuous session. Group 2 completed their training in 2 sessions, while Group 3 completed the same training across 4 sessions. Group 3 demonstrated the best recall and job performance.

Interval based reinforcement, or the spacing effect, has been known and seemingly ignored for a long time. Pike’s research into adult retention span in 1994 concluded that if people were exposed to an idea one time, at the end of 30 days they retained less than 10%. But if they were exposed to an idea six times with interval reinforcement, at the end of 30 days they retained more than 90%. Interval reinforcement maintains that knowledge and learning presented once and then reviewed perhaps ten minutes later, an hour later, a day later, three days later, a week later, is cognitively assimilated in a more robust and usable manner, dramatically improving active recall. Will Thalheimer, a consultant and learning researcher based in Massachusetts, USA has produced an excellent paper (Spacing Learning Over Time, 2006) summarising the breadth of research that has been conducted on determining the spacing effect.

The overwhelming conclusion is that spacing learning over time produces substantial learning benefits. The ideal interval of time between repetitions of learning is roughly equal to the retention interval – the time you expect learners to remember information before putting it into practice on the job – this could be hours, days, weeks or even months. Indeed an interesting observation is that longer time intervals between repetitions of learning result in better long term retention. There is still debate around the causes of this effect, but it is likely to be due to the extra cognitive effort creating stronger, more varied memory traces and the development of more effective encoding strategies that aid remembering.

Train your brain in minutes a day!

There is still too little discussion and real focused application of the spacing effect in the workplace with regard to training design. It should no longer be seen as esoteric research but central to future training design. Indeed, it is already in the mainstream with the hugely successful Brain Training software available on the Nintendo DS handheld game console. This game has motivated millions of people - young and old - to regularly complete fun mental exercises aimed at improving active cognitive performance, all based on the spacing effect. Indeed, the software insists on short ten minute daily activity and then tracks your improvement accordingly. Nintendo have now taken this further with the English Training software based on similar principles which is also proving to be a huge hit. We could learn a lot from this successful approach to engaging and sustaining attention and learning activity.

Informal learning

It appears we are at the cusp of a shift in emphasis away from the current dominance of formal learning (structured courses, workshop events, sequenced instructional experiences) to an increased recognition of informal learning. In the USA, Jay Cross and other learning commentators are spearheading a drive to understand the ‘80% of learning’ that currently falls outside the scope of formal Learning and Development. This includes day to day activities such as conversations with peers, self-motivated searching for information and answers, experience drawn from practice on the job, storytelling exchanges in the bars and cafés after hours. This naturally takes into account the spacing effect and each individual activity or action is inherently small and conducted frequently. As this trend takes hold, it may put further pressure on formal training and development budgets as efforts to justify their effectiveness continue to prove inconclusive. This can already be seen in the growing interest in, and use of, the phrase ‘employee engagement’. This starts to draw together previously separate functions of communication, learning and performance and will mean a re-definition and reframing of how we design learning solutions in the future. Intuitively, it makes sense to start viewing things from the employees point of view and begin to coordinate and schedule communications and training messages so that they are mutually supportive rather than confusing and contradictory. Too often it is the latter in large organisations.

The role of technology

Our relationship with technology has shifted in recent years. We rely on it and expect more from it than ever before. From online shopping, listening to music and watching movies, searching for information, playing games, to talking with our families and friends across the world. We, as consumers, are demanding instant gratification and control over what we spend our time on. This has to impact education and training. There are clear signs that the status quo is beginning to unravel as students and trainees take control of their own learning experiences through collaboration with respected peers and experts, through instant access to supporting content, and through immediate practice of newly acquired skills in safe, virtual environments that realistically simulate the eventual work experience. The model of the traditional “course” looks decidedly clunky in this new world.

With an always connected environment we can start to see support solutions being developed that are designed to optimise the spacing effect. Some exist already in the guise of performance support or workflow based learning. Knowlagent offer the ability to deliver 15 minute modules of learning content to call centre employees in between customer calls. Fort Hill Company in the USA has a system that manages reinforcement and practice at optimal intervals for the individual learner. Rest assured, more systems will follow as awareness grows of the powerful impact the spacing effect has on learning effectiveness and employee performance.

Remember. Less learning, more often. Don’t forget!

Less Learning More Often

Back in May 2006, I was fortunate to take part in a UK government mission to the USA to explore what lay "Beyond eLearning" (click the link for the final report). Travelling to both coasts (Boston and Silicon Valley) we met a great mix of academic (MIT Medialab, Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning) and corporate organisations (Cisco, Fidelity Investments, Microsoft, IBM to name a few). We also had the chance to mingle with Linden Labs (the guys behind Second Life) and other organisations active in areas of interest to the learning community - virtual worlds, serious games, social networking and mobile.

As part of the process we also participated in two workshop exchanges where we had to summarise our areas of particular interest. For my 2 minute introduction, I summarised my thoughts in the title of this post - Less Learning More Often.

This apparently self contradictory phrase actually goes to the heart of the problems we face in designing learning experiences either in education or in the work place. Too much "learning" occurs out of context and out of sync with our ability to put that learning into practice. We bunch learning into hours, half days, days, even weeks (or years if you include school and university) without much heed to the way our brains are actually wired to learn most efficiently. Indeed, we can't help but forget most of what we are presented with.

I proposed that learning content should be designed for consumption in much smaller, engaging elements using mixed media and accessed at intervals woven into normal daily activity. The principles of interval-based reinforcement and the spacing effect are still widely ignored even though the economic landscape has changed to allow us to deliver repetition and reinforcement anytime and anywhere it is needed/requested. Will Thalheimer, a valiant defender of research-based learning design, has a great paper on this very subject which should be required reading for all learning professionals going forward.

Since then, I've reflected on this further and written and presented on this myself, most recently at Online Educa in Berlin in 2007.

As we go into 2008 the sheer ubiquity of internet access and the renewed focus on usable interfaces (at last!) for our digital devices opens up intriguing new design avenues for learning and performance support. I'll be using this blog to develop my thinking further and hopefully connect with others with a similar interest.

I look forward to it!

One Page Guides - Quality over Quantity

Tim Davies has produced some great examples of how small, targeted and (crucially) well designed resources can be highly effective in learning. Tim's One Page Guides on subjects such as wikis, blogs and sharing stories give novices the confidence to take some action of their own. As Brent Schenkler comments:

"I'm certain it did not take ANY ISD knowledge to create these. But I'm certain MANY people will be learning from these...go figure."

I've long advocated a wider sphere of design influence for those involved in training and learning design. Doggedly sticking to one structured methodology is not going to work any more, if it ever did.

Mobile Learning goes large in 2008

Here's another sign that the barriers to anytime, anywhere learning are falling indicated in this report in the Financial Times:

"After years of false dawns for operators, the use of mobile phones for web surfing is on the verge of becoming widespread in Europe and the US, and iPhone research by O2 shows the device is acting as an important catalyst for such activity."

"Matthew Key, who becomes chief executive of O2 Europe next month, told the Financial Times that 60 per cent of the company’s iPhone customers in the UK were sending or receiving more than 25 megabytes of data a month, the equivalent of 7,500 e-mails without attachments or 25 YouTube videos. By comparison, less than 2 per cent of O2’s other UK customers on monthly payment contracts use more than 25MB a month.

“Here’s absolute proof that if you get the proposition right, customers will use data,” said Mr Key, who reached a deal with Apple for O2 to be the exclusive UK network operator for the iPhone."

I couldn't agree more Mr Key. As other mobile device manufacturers play catch up with Apple, we'll see much more easy (and cost effective) access to mobile data. Having bought an iPod Touch it's proven to me further that the directness of the touch interface and removal of delay allows you to engage with the content in hand (literally in this case) and becomes a more powerful experience for it.

This is exciting for e-learning designers like myself as this has got to translate into more real opportunities to design learning experiences around my "Less Learning More Often" principle. More on that in another post.

Seasonal Best Wishes to all!