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This entry is part 8 of 21 in the series Ten Steps to Complex Learning (the book)

Note: this is a continuation of the previous post in this series,
because I can’t seem to summarize and comment on one of the
Ten Steps to Complex Learning in a single post.)

Step 3 is “set performance objectives.”  As the introduction and first section of this chapter emphasize, this is an iterative process, not a linear one.  The real-life tasks in which you perform the complex skill help to determine the overall learning goals and the specific tasks that will help achieve them.

In turn, these help refine understanding of the complex skill and the constituent skills that it embodies.

After analyzing (or “decomposing”) the skills, you create performance objectives.  I’ve discussed Van Merriënboer and Kirscher’s actions and the tools and conditions that apply to the objectives.  It’s a bit tough to talk about standards as they describe them.

Keeping to the standards

The Ten Steps sees standards as having four elements: criteria, values, and attitudes.  Criteria means what you think: minimum requirements for things like accuracy, speed, quality, and so forth.

Values indicate that the constituent skill conforms to some set of rules or regulations.  Two examples vM&K offer: “without violating traffic rules” and “taking the ICAO safety regulations into account.”

My feelings are mixed.  I can see the value of this as shorthand (“wiring for this remodeling must meet the National Electrical Code”).  Is there a little game of gotcha on the side?  Or are we acknowledging that in complex learning, there are areas of performance that matter, even if we’re not going to provide instruction related to them?

I really can’t say; this just feels a bit like a junk drawer in the conceptual cabinet of the Ten Steps.

Feelings about attitudes

If values are the junk drawer of instructional design, attitudes are like scribbling “Get organized!” on a to-do list.  The Ten Steps doesn’t define “attitudes,” but says they’re “subordinate to, but fully integrated with” constituent skills.

Apparently we’ll know them when we see them.  However, they won’t be things like “have a client-centered attitude.”  vM&K say this is a non-example: a research librarian doesn’t need to have such an attitude outside of work, nor does he need to have it when doing tasks that don’t involve clients.

So, whatever an attitude is, it’s not an enduring part of your personality.  I actually think there is such a thing as attitude; I just don’t think  you can influence it directly very well.  The Ten Steps seems to agree:

It is only necessary to specify the attitude in the performance objective for these relevant constituent skills. If possible, all observable behaviors that indicate or demonstrate the attitude should be formulated or specified in a way that they are observable!  The standard “with a smile on your face” is more concrete, and thus more observable, than “friendly;” “regularly performing checks” is more concrete…than “punctual…”

“With a smile on your face?”

This is an unsatisfactory nod toward a complex issue.  Think of medical professionals interacting with patients (so-called bedside manner).  Can it be that helping a surgeon demonstrate interest in the person and not just the condition–”Dr. Manoogian, your gall bladder’s in room 5″–might require this close a focus?

Classifying Objectives

Three dimensions apply to the objectives you develop (remember, these are objectives for the constituent skills that make up the overall complex skill):

• Teach, or not?
• Non-recurrent, or recurrent?
• Make automatic, or not?

The easy part is sorting out the objectives you’re not going to include in your training–either because the typical performer already has these skills, or because the objectives are covered elsewhere.  Those that remain fall into four groups.

Non-recurrent skills, you’ll recall, are applied differently to different problem situations.  They involve schema-based problem solving and reasoning.  They require supporting information like cognitive maps during the training, which is the topic for Step 4.

Recurrent skills are those you apply the same way to different problem situations.  They’re the rule-based skills.  In training, these require procedurall information.

vM&K state that any prerequisite skills for a recurrent skill are by definition recurrent.  “A recurrent constituent skill,” they says, ” can never have non-recurrent aspects!”  Since they say with with both italics and the second exclamation point in two pages, they must mean it.

The same skill, they go on, could be non-recurrent in one training program, but recurrent in another.  Repair of military aircraft in peacetime might be a non-recurrent skill, because there’s time for diagnosis.  In wartime, one of the criteria is to repair or replace as quickly as possible, which could mean that repair becomes a more procedure-driven and thus recurrent task.

Some recurrent skills require a high level of automaticity.  This involves the part-task practice discussed in Step 10.  Some jobs don’t require this type of automaticity (for example, the recurrent patent-examiner task).  Factors that suggest automaticity include:

• Enabling other skills higher in the hierarchy. Musicians practice scales, even after achieving a high level of skill, in order to automate basic skills and enable more fluid performance of higher skill.
• Simultaneous performance with many other skills. Process operators in manufacturing and air-traffic controllers are two types of jobs where the individual reads displays automatically as she analyzes and responds to dynamic sistuations.
• High risk in terms of cost, damage to equipment, or danger to life. Pilots and flight attendants practice emergency procedures.

Ten Steps makes a point that not all routine skills need automation.  There’s a cost/benefit consideration — you don’t memorize all the addition possibilities of two numbers from 0 to 999; you do (eventually) automate the skill needed to keep a car moving in a straight line.

Twofers

“Rare situations” exist, according to vM&K, when you’d choose to automate a non-recurrent skill.  They use “double classified” for what seems to be combinations of recurrent and non-recurrent skills, like their example of shutting down a power plant in an emergency.

The shutdown can occur in many ways, depending on circumstances (non-recurrent), but must follow specific procedures (recurrent).  This is an expensive decision and often requires high-fidelity simulation.  In addition, the authors say that learners should be explicitly told that they’ll switch from automated mode to problem-solving mode at times.

The things you left out

Remember that “category” of objectives that you won’t be teaching?

If learners have already mastered a particular constituent skill in an isolated manner, this is no guarantee that they can carry it out in the context of whole-task performance.  Performing a particular constituent skill in isolation is completely different from performing it in the context of a whole task, and automaticity of a constituent skill that has been developed through extensive aprt-task practice is often not preserved in the context of whole-task performance.

Which is to say that when Bruno gets a perfect score on the loan-application system, it doesn’t necessarily mean he can use it while interviewing a live loan applicant at the bank branch.

Objectives and assessment

It’s pretty obvious that clear, observable objectives relating to clusters of constituent skills that make up the complex skill have many benefits.  You can develop tools to help learners do self-assessment.  You can provide support for a peer, who can help identify areas of improvement (and whose own performance can benefit from helping the other person).

IN assessment, values and attitudes are usually measured narratively, or through qualitative scales (very poor, poor, acceptable, good, excellent).

vM&K acknowledge the potential burden of a highly-detailed assessment, which is virtually a necessity for complex sills.  They recommend self-assessment and peer assessment.  They also suggest a development portfolio, a collection of assessments for all learning tasks.

This details what the learner’s done and how well he’s doen.  He can choose his next learning tasks based on this information.

In the next post, we’ll (finally) move from the learning task component to the supportive information component.  The corresponding steps are designing supporting information (Step 4), analyzing cognitive strategies (Step 5), and analyzing mental models (Step 6).

A pair of interesting posts from Cognitive Daily:

• Is expert memory better than non-expert memory?
• What is a visual expert?

(The first post includes a mini-experiment for you to participate in.  Give it a try.)

Dave Munger quotes a study suggesting that experts have a larger visual working memory in their area of expertise than non-experts do.  But he cites a second study suggesting that experts don’t have a larger working memory; their memory is more detailed.  Think of the difference between having a larger computer, and having a computer with many different applications on it.

Munger’s second post explores whether those experts are good at recognizing objects other than faces–since humans are really good at face-recognition.

Again in the second post, there’s a quick experiment for you to try.

The conclusion Munger draws from the second experiment is that “for visual short-term memory, expertise isn’t about prior knowledge, but the ability to process visual images more efficiently.

So what? In part, this suggests that expertise is not (surprise, surprise) an inborn trait. You don’t get to “expert” level because you had more parking space in your brain; your work increases you ability to make use of the space you do have.

It’s not so much knowing a lot of things; it’s being able to recognize and relate patterns.  We know a lot about ways to help people purposefully increase their ability.  Not everyone can end up as a world-class expert, but it’s certainly possible to shift the average performance upward.

(Added 3/3/09: it’s significant that I posted this four days ago and only now noticed I hadn’t included a title…)

Gadget-pyramid image by andyi, used under a CC license.

Thanks to Dean Shareski for highlighting this TED talk.  I don’t need to say more.  It’s worth watching.

I don’t remember when she started, but my mother long ago found a reliable answer to “What’s for dinner?” “Goddagoes.”

You’ve had them yourself: you open the fridge, poke around, and say, “That’s gotta go… and that’s gotta go.”  Goddagoes.

I’ve been feeling a little mentally undernourished–too much attention to Twitter, maybe.  Watching the stream is like channel-surfing: often not much there, but you hope things’ll get better.  (Physically undernourished, maybe?  It’s been four weeks since I had a kitchen.)

So a few items I found rummaging around my feedreader:

Tom Stone at the Element K blog posted a great primer on RSS.  Yeah, I know; if you’re reading this, you probably don’t need the primer–but you may know people who can make use of it.

One welcoming touch: Tom put a bunch of feeds into an OPML file and explained how to pull them into Google Reader–to give a jumpstart to RSS newcomers.

At the Neurotopia 2.0 blog, Scicurious asks if you’re an egghead.  She reminded me about the Scientific American podcasts, which come in sturdy 40-minute and low-calorie “60-second science” versions.  Most of her post is a review of a print collection of those mini-morsels, The Instant Egghead Guide to the Mind.

And at the SharpBrains blog, a twofer.  Alvaro Fernandez posts a monthly online newsletter (here’s January’s) about cognitive health and brain fitness.

One of the items: an interview with Joshua Waitzkin.  A former chess champion (whose early years were turned into the film Searching for Bobby Fischer), Waitzkin recently wrote The Art of Learning.  In the interview, he mentions the work of Carol Dweck (about whom I posted here) in the context of being called a child prodigy:

The most perilous danger, in the language of Carol Dweck, is that we internalize an entity theory of intelligence. The moment we believe that success is determined by an ingrained level of ability as opposed to resilience and hard work, we will be brittle in the face of adversity. For that reason, it is incredibly important for parents to make their feedback process related as opposed to praising or criticizing talent. Think about it-if you tell a kid that she is a winner, which a lot of well-intentioned parents do, then she learns that her winning is because of something ingrained in her. But if we win because we are a winner, then when we lose it must make us a loser.

Not that any of these items had to go, so much as I thought I’d like to set them out.

I’m nearly done moving my domains and their blogs from the old ISP to the new one.  It hasn’t been that bumpy a ride–though it has been like getting lost in a part of the country you’re unfamiliar with.

By that I mean, if you’re lost in a place you know, you figure you’re going to get your bearings eventually.  But if you’re lost in a place you don’t know, then your brain’s restless urge to form patterns will fire right up, and you’ll be seeing all sorts of patterns that don’t support the meaning you lay on them.

This is why, in unfamiliar places, you keep seeing people who remind you of people you know. The small details — a pair of glasses, the set of a nose, even a gait — leap out from the whole, and your brain thinks, “That guy really reminds me of my cousin Frank.”  Your brain’s seized on one item and generalized it into a pattern.

In any event, while the changeover has been a bit tedious, it’s been mostly harmless.  The biggest puzzle is that somehow, a flock of accented letters ( Â , to be specific) seems to have descended on my past posts.  As near as I can tell, it shows up wherever I had had two consecutive spaces in the past.

(That’s an old typing-class habit, and I’ve been typing for more than 40 years, so it’s pretty deeply rooted.)

If you have any idea how I can root that out of an entire mySQL database, do let me know.

I’ve got some maintenance to do (the sidebar’s a bit messed up), but it’s good to be back.

Photo by Dano / Dan McKay.