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This entry is part 20 of 21 in the series Ten Steps to Complex Learning (the book)

Chapter 15 of Ten Steps to Complex Learning looks at self-directed learning.  Van Merriënboer and Kirschner’s ten steps are part of a blueprint for programs for learning–a way to structure learning for complex real-world tasks.  Since the Ten Steps include things like dynamic selection of learning tasks based on the learner’s interest and abilities, there’s a natural fit with self-directed learning.

Successful self-directed learning requires skills like:

• Orienting: What do I want to learn?  Where could I learn it?  How can I use it?
• Planning: What should I do?  How much time and effort do I need?
• Monitoring: Have I learned enough from this task?  Am I paying attention to context?
• Adjusting: Do I need to make changes?  Do I need some help?
• Assessing: Have I reached my goal?  What do I need to work on next?

These skills are beyond the scope of the Ten Steps, but many principles contained in the steps support the skills in action.

vM&K see three levels of self-directed learning.  Independent part-task practice is the simplest.  Within an overall program, a learner can choose practice items.  That’s because part-task practice applies best to well-defined items that fit well into individual practice and benefit from such things as automated drill-and-practice.

Just-in-time open education goes beyond the procedural aspects of part-task practice.  Think of it as resource-based learning that includes supportive information–in other words, this level of self-directed learning includes problem-solving and reasoning aspects of the learning tasks.

With on-demand education, learners decide not only on the resources but on the learning tasks as well.  Challenges for the learner include:

• How to choose an appropriate level of difficulty
• How to obtain an appropriate level of support and guidance
• How to get enough variability (so that learning tasks vary as much as they do in the real world)

Reading those points reminded me of my own experience with Head First HTML with CSS, a book that teaches you, well, HTML and CSS (my post about the book).  Head First absolutely worked for me–I liked the presentation, I liked the level of detail, I learned lots of stuff.  But it might not work for everyone.  The authors themselves say the book’s not for you if you’re completely new to computers, or if you’re a skilled web developer looking for a reference book, or if you’re afraid to try something different.

(Though you’ll find this on page xxvi:
Note from marketing: this book is for anyone with a credit card.)

How’m I doing with self-directed learning?

This chapter has a highly detailed discussion about assessing performance in self-directed learning.  Keep in mind that the Ten Steps assume that performance standards remain constant throughout a learning program.  What differs from level to level is the complexity of the task and thus the relevant portion of the standards.

A program for trauma specialists would have highly detailed standards for diagnosis, for example.  A subset of those skills might be “take vital signs,” which make up one aspect of the much larger skill.

Assessment methods with a high reliability (e.g., multiple choice tests) have, in general, a relatively low external validity, and, vice-versa, assessment methods with a high external validity (e.g., on the job performance) have a relatively low reliability.  Therefore, the Ten Steps recommend using a rich mix of assessment methods….A mix of assessors should also be used.

vM&K say that the most important assessor in self-directed learning is the learner herself.  Next come peer assessments from fellow learners or colleagues.  Finally, assessors can include teachers, instructors, experts, customers, and others who engage with the learner.

Vertical and horizontal assessment

This chapter ends with a concept that confused me for quite a while.  The authors talk about “protocol portfolio scoring,” a complicated tool for standards, assessment results, and “vertical and horizontal assessment.”  Here’s what I think they’re talking about:

The Ten Steps is all about learning whole tasks.  It’s also about learning through task classes: clusters of learning tasks with similar overall difficulty but variations that reflect the real world.

Imagine that there were eight aspects (or facets) that could apply to the tasks in a class, even if each task didn’t have each aspect.  A vertical assessment looks at one aspect for all the tasks, while a horizontal assessment looks at all aspects for one task.

You can see an example in this Google Books search of Ten Steps (opens in a new window).  Look at the chart on page 236.  The center columns show “vertical standards” for eight aspects that apply to the six tasks that make up class 1.  Not every aspect applies–for example, only five aspects apply to task 1.1.

If you’re training hairstylists, class 1 might involve simple kinds of haircuts.   You could have several basic skills in class 1, with some tasks involving curly hair and some straight.

As I understand the explanation that follows, vertical scoring is cumulative–so I could miss one or two curly-hair aspects but achieve competence in this aspect over the entire class.  The horizontal scoring for each task deals with all its aspects.

I thought this was wildly and needlessly complicated until I read that the horizontal scores reflect adaptation.  Without going into too much detail, because the learner failed the horizontal score for task 1.1 (scored 3.0 when the standard was 3.74), task 1.2 provided more support.  The learner missed that one, too, so task 1.3 provided even more support.

At the same time, the vertical scores reflect emphasis.  If overall I don’t do well on, say, doing a basic trim, the vertical score can tell me that I’m falling short on scissor use and on working with curly hair.   I’m doing fine on asking the customer what he wants and on choosing where to cut.

Support and guidance for self-directed learning

More learner control isn’t always a good idea.  Low-ability learners can’t always make wise choices.  If you’ve never used HTML, you can’t make good decisions about whether to use CSS.  How do you decide the number of tasks to choose, and how do you select the specific tasks?

One approach is what vM&K call the intelligent agent–a person or a smart tool.  I’ve recently had experience with the latter–built-in advice from the Wii Fit.  The program has built-in assessments, offers a selection of activities (exercises), and monitors progress.  Probably not at the same level as a personal trainer, but suited to my not-quite-Olympic level of fitness.

“Support” in Ten Steps terms refers to procedural skills–so an intelligent agent is a bit like a Consumer Reports article, discussing various facts that you apply to your own situation.  “Guidance” refers to cognitive strategies and rules of thumb.

An unanswered question is who puts all this stuff together?  I have some thoughts I’m still mulling over.  The short-term answer might be, “What do you mean by who?”  For some complex skills, and for some contexts for those skills, you might have a fairly permanent body, like a medical school or a pilot-training program.  For others, “who” and “this stuff” may vary according to the skills and the performers.

CC-licensed images:
Graffiti report card by bbaunach.
“Loading” (from actual software) by me.

Once upon a time, some people were set in their ways.  It wasn’t hard to find evidence that their habits, which seemed to them sensible and productive, were often dumb and sometimes dangerous.

Many of these people would laugh if you suggested that.  Others would become hostile.  A few, in private conversations, would concede some nugget of truth; deep down, they saw the benefit of change–but man, changing is hard.

You can probably think of examples: trainers and presenters welded to a world of PowerPoint bullets.  Scattered workforces ignoring collaborative software.  People who just don’t get Twitter.  It’s maybe  easier to understand people who just don’t get a $600 telephone–but if you have one, you’re already coming up with reasons why it makes sense.

Something else that makes sense: staying off the phone while you’re driving.

Sunday’s New York Times had a front-page article about this.  Before you go read it, consider whether you talk (or text) while you’re driving.

Nationwide Insurance surveyed 1,500 drivers.  Of those who own cellphones, 81% have talked on the phone while in the car.  (I’m surprised it’s that low.)  18% have texted while in the car.

98% of those surveyed said they consider themselves to be safe drivers.  Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the drivers are above average.

And 45% said they have either been hit or nearly hit by someone using a cellphone.

There isn’t a lot of hard data directly connecting cellphone use and accidents, in part because the police don’t ask, and in part because a lot of people don’t tell.  But there’s plenty of evidence about the inability of drivers to cope with distractions like talking.  Hands-free sets make almost no difference, by the way: it’s not that you’re holding the phone, it’s that you’re holding a phone conversation.

Strayer’s research [at the University of Utah], using a small camera to track his volunteers’ eye movements, shows that texting drivers regularly focus on their screens for stretches of more than five seconds.

At 30 miles an hour, in five seconds your car will move 220 feet, nearly three times the length of a tennis court.  At 60, the distance is 440 feet, or one and a half football fields.

You might think you’re multitasking, but you’re fooling yourself more than you’re fooling the rest of us.  We know you’re on the phone, because your reactions are like those of a semi-pro margarita taster.

My point isn’t really about using cellphones in the car, though.  It’s a thought that came to me when I read the Times article: many people I know and respect in the learning field have cellphones.  I suspect many of them use them in their car–I’ve used mine–despite the obvious distraction, let alone danger.

Someone who’d find it hard to stop using the phone while driving for, say, a week–let alone the rest of 2009–can hardly complain when people resist reading blogs, using wikis, or making Twitter a daily tool.

I’ve always felt that change is easy, especially if someone else is the one who needs to change.

CC-licensed images:
Woman with sunglasses by stephendamron.
Man in red shirt by William Holtkamp.
Truck drive by talkingdc.
Squinting woman by schatz.

This entry is part 19 of 21 in the series Ten Steps to Complex Learning (the book)

Chapter 14 of Ten Steps to Complex Learning deals with the use of media.  Van Merriënboer and Kirscher make clear that they’re discussing the preliminary selection of media; media choices change as the design process continues.

They related media to the four main components of the Ten Steps; those components in turn relate to four key learning processes.  I’ve made this chart based on one of theirs:

What I especially like is the way the chart summarizes the underpinnings of the Ten Steps. For example, when you’re dealing with non-recurrent tasks (and if you’ve read any of the previous posts in this series, you know that means “things you do differently each time you confromt a new task), you want to help the learner build cognitive strategies and mental models (see the overview for Step 4).

Keep it real?  Not always.

Because the Ten Steps so strongly advocate whole tasks, it’s no surprise that the ideal media to support induction would include real or simulated task environments.  You might use less elaborate simulations in the early stages of learning; novices are sometimes hindered by over-rich environments.

Other advantages of simulations over actual environments:

• Control of sequence: the designer and the learner aren’t restricted to whatever real-life situation happens to come along.
• Learner support: unlike the real world, a simulation can provide both supportive and procedural information.
• Safety: simulations reduce or eliminate dangers to the learner (or to others, like coworkers who might suffer from a beginner’s mistakes)
• Control of time: a simulation can speed up or slow down processes to help the learner attend to detail or see the consequence of his actions.

Some media make it easier to provide dynamic task selection–proving a unique set of problems to each learner.  This aids adaptive training, which in turn tends to help learners do better in training and transfer skills more readily to the job.

How you did and what to do

This dynamic selection requires continuous assessment against objectives and criteria.  vM&K point out, though, that assessment is inadequate for diagnosis.  Knowing that someone can’t do X doesn’t tell you why, nor what to do about it.

For routine tasks (right, the recurrent ones), it’s relatively to analyze errors and give corrective feedback.  These tasks have correct procedures or interpretations, and often what I think of as expected wrong answers.  In the problem 3 ( 2x + 5 ) = 9 , if your answer is x = 2/3, you almost certainly multiplied 2x, but not 5, by 3.

It’s still hard for computer-based systems to diagnose well when it comes to errors in non-recurrent tasks (problem solving, reasoning, and so on).

[T]he teacher or instructor will typically provide this type of cognitive feedback, or the learners will be invited to critically compare and contrast their own problem-solving and reasoning processes with those of others–including expert task performers.

Along the same lines, learners could be involved in the assessment of their own performance…or the performance of other learners….

Beyond the learning task

The Ten Steps sees a real or simulated task environment as the primary medium.  After that, secondary media support the other three components of vM&K’s learning blueprint.

For non-recurrent tasks, supportive information helps the learner connect new information to what she already knows.  Media that allows her to interact with and explore models and examples encourages elaboration.  In this view, a simulation of a conceptual domain is not to practice a skill–for that, the simulation would involve whole tasks.  Rather, simulations or case studies related to the domain help the learner construct and improve her mental models of that domain.

Hypermedia allows the learner to move from one informational element to another, in a connected way, and thus explore relationships in that field.  The Ten Steps offers three principles to help stimulate deep processing:

• The redundancy principle says that presenting redundant information typically has a negative effect on learning.
• The self-explanation principle holds that learners benefit from trying to connect new items to each other and to existing knowledge.  Learning tasks can prompt them to, for example, identify underlying principles.
• The self-pacing principle says that giving learners control over the pace of a presentation can facilitate elaboration and deep processing.  The learner benefits from being able to pause, rewind,  or replayaudio or video, for example.  This allows them to pause and reflect on the new information

For recurrent tasks, vM&K say that procedural information must be available when it’s needed, and in small enough units to be helpful.  Step 7 touched on the problem of split attention.  Other principles for online help include signaling (e.g., explaining a process step-by-step; highlighting parts in an engine repair) and modality (using two modes for presenting information, such as an audio explanation of a detailed blueprint.

Finally, part-task practice benefits from media that support small-step, drill-and-practice techniques that lead to automaticity.

CC-licensed image of BVE train simulator by Alan_D.

Tom Gilbert sometimes talked about watching Martina Navratilova’s feet.   It was an analogy for observing an exemplary performer, rather than asking the exemplar about her work.

Martina might not be able to explain why she stands a certain way, or even how she stands, in a given situation.  She’s honed her expertise over thousands of situations; she’s responded to variations that average players aren’t even aware of.

That’s not to say she couldn’t be aware of how she moves, only that such awareness results from observation and reflection.

Timm Esque of Intel published an article in Performance and Instruction, the ISPI journal, in December 1995 — “Watching Tom Gilbert’s Feet.”   Gilbert was working on a project at Intel, and Esque wrote about differences between what Gilbert said and what he did.   The article’s online, though only for people with a Wiley InterScience account.   (ISPI members get access through their membership.)

Esque makes the point that you can’t always start with observation.   In tennis, he says, success is pretty clear, so you’re safe in observing champions.   In many (most?) work settings, successful performance is not so clear.

Always define the accomplishments that make up successful performance before trying to identify behaviors that make one performer more successful.

– Timm Esque

This tracks well with Gilbert’s dislike for the idea that there are born talents.  Martina may have had some physical and mental advantages, and especially at the highest level of performance, those will matter.  But when you start by doing what the exemplar does, you can get stuck in a web of behavior — the how-to-do. As Joe Harless said, behaviors are verbs, accomplishments are nouns.   There’s a big difference between selling cars and cars sold.

Another, more challenging issue: distinguishing processes from jobs.   Individual jobs, especially inside an organizations, rarely result in a complete product.   They might have outcomes, but you need several different individual outcomes to get to the outcome of a process.   As Esque says, “Exemplary performance is usually the product of performances by a variety of performers around a single process.”

The Navratilova analogy might fall apart there–singles tennis involves a single performer (well, okay, two of them).  Still, her high level of skill is the result of working with others–opponents, doubles partners, coaches, trainers.  As for the rest of us, we tend to work with that variety of performers (coworkers, clients, vendors).

Photo of Martina Navratilova at the 2005 U.S. Open by t_a_i_s / Ta­s Melillo.

Jane Bozarth has two pieces of advice for learning professionals: get comfortable with technology so you can use it, and let go of control.  The second part stood out for me, especially after seeing elsewhere last week a blog comment about the need to “police the learning.”

I’m restraining the urge to rant about corporate control freaks.  For one thing, I’ve often had to work with “compliance training”–mandatory sessions on manufacturing procedures or EEOC requirements or some other topic.  You can fuss about the need for such requirements, but in the short term, the organization hasn’t got much choice.

I’ve also been thinking more about gradation; thinking in either/or fashion is easy, but not always productive.

Take that term “policing.”  Coming so close to Canada Day, it brought to mind Maintiens le droit, the motto of the RCMP.

You can translate it in more than one way: “uphold the law,” for example, or “support the right.”

If I study “police the learning,” I can read it as, “Make sure they learn what they’re supposed to.”  And that can have more than one interpretation:

• Help them learn what the job requires.
• Help them learn what they require.

On the job requirement side, I’m the first to agree that there are things that an organization needs its people to do: use compatible tools, confirm to particular policies, following procedural timelines, work within legal and ethical standards.

If you’re a sales rep for Transgalactic Widgets, we want you using our custom sales software–not because it’s the best on earth, but because you’re part of a team of 1,500 people putting data in and getting data out.  And anytime you deal with Perrault and Pryzbylski, Inc., we want you using the customer contact report in our software so as to share what you know with the rest of us.

Mostly, that’s straightforward, procedural stuff (what Ten Steps to Complex Learning calls recurrent tasks).  “Policing” might really mean making clear to people what the policy or practice is, helping them follow it, and removing obstacles so they can get done what they need to get done.

The non-recurrent tasks, those things people do in different ways each time they do them, aren’t really open to “policing,” though.  If my goal is to help the sales force get more skillful with analyzing leads, planning pitches, and working with a customer’s particular situation, then command-and-control approaches aren’t going to get me there.

In other words, even in the supposedly straightforward use of the sales system, we’ll need judgment, insight, creativity, and especially the insight of the people who are the sales system.  Otherwise, the stuff on laptops and servers is just a bunch of code with no place to go.

That’s all wrapped inside learning what the job requires.  Remember, though, there’s another angle: help people learn what they require.  Like their personal job-related goals.  Or goals they’re worked out, as individuals, with their manager or their teammates.

The goals might relate to what they want to be able to do in the current job, or what they want to be able to do in new contexts–a changing definition of their job, or an entire new role.

There’s no way you can support that kind of learning if you’re mainly thinking about is maintaining control and enforcing The One True Approach.  As Jane Bozarth suggests, learning professionals in organizations need skill in

…tolerating ambiguity, letting learners take over the learning, and coping with ‘messy’ conversations….Can this new attitude be developed? I think so, if the trainer-person is actually interested in helping others learn, in enriching the experience, and in working as a guide alongside rather than sage on the stage.