Bottom-Line Performance

“If “everybody knows” such-and-such, then it ain’t so, by at least ten thousand to one.”

From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long, by R.A. Heinlein.

Everybody knows that people learn more when they’re having fun, right?

As I was looking for something to write about this week, I stumbled on this article on the dangers of smile sheets. (Thanks to Will Thalheimer’s blog , where it was posted.) It turns out that meta review of the available data tells us that how much people enjoy a learning experience has very little relevance to how much they learn during that experience. As Neil Rackham, the professor of professional selling says, “high enjoyment is not necessarily related to high learning. If you have a trainer who tells 100 war stories and is very entertaining, that instructor can end up getting tremendous ratings for ‘perceived learning,’ but two hours later, trainees can’t remember a single thing that came out of the session”

This is true in general of performance improvement strategies. A 1998 review of performance improvement strategies cited in Richard E. Clark’s book Turning Research into Results: A Guide to Selecting the Right Performance Solutions, a third of strategies actually made performance worse!  To make performance better, there needs to be a clear correlation between the feedback and the goal behavior. Simple enough – on its face, but of course much harder to do in practice. After all, how much of the work we do these days has clear, well-defined performance standards documented?

This is a challenge for e-learning, too. All the extra text our SMEs want us to put in to provide background, or to link the content to something fun and interesting may actually be reducing the effectiveness of our training. In fact, in one classic study, the lessons with the fewest words resulted in the most learning. Cathy Moore’s post, here, links directly to a pdf of the whole article.

Learning is, after all, a profession. Accountants don’t operate their business on the concept that people have to like them for their work to be valuable. Perhaps learning professionals will ultimately have to come to the same conclusion.

What do you think?

Tags: assessment, effectiveness, elearning

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 1:13 pm and is filed under Learning Research, learning design, learning transfer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.