Designing Classroom Exercises for Highly Technical Content

Good training helps companies develop happy and productive workers. If organizations are going to spend thousands of dollars on conducting training for their employees and thousands more in lost productivity from taking employees away from their jobs for training, then they need to maximize their return on that considerable investment. Organizations need to make sure they are doing everything they can to ensure that training is useful, that they are using the most modern teaching methods, and that their employees are getting the most out of their class and time away from work. Incorporating useful exercises into the course can accomplish this.

Why activity is important

We all remember the 100 percent lecture coursethat mind-numbing classroom experience in which a professor droned on for hours and the only break in the monotony was the clicking of a PowerPoint slide or the ticking of the slowly moving wall clock. Sadly, many technical training courses mirror this experience. There is a myth that telling equals training. However, there is a difference between a learner listening to information and a learner actually acquiring knowledge. The act of sitting in a classroom and listening or observing a class is called passive learning.

Active learning is the oppositeit involves participation in activities and the engaging of learners in the subject matter itself. Examples of active learning include completing a worksheet, participating in class discussion, working through a simulation, and so on. The consensus of the training industry is that effective training courses incorporate active learning principles.

Lecture can be useful and does have its place in training, but as lecture tends to be grossly overrepresented, its usage must be minimized. You can include a passive learning element such as lecture or direct instruction in your course, but it needs to be managed properly.

The primacy-recency effect

In 1962, a psychologist named Bennet Murdock conducted an experiment in which he gave participants a list of items to memorize. When Murdock later asked these participants to recall the items on the list, he discovered an interesting phenomenon. Across the board, participants tended to remember the same items from the list. Specifically, they tended to remember items at the beginning and the end of the list, with their recall of items in the middle tapering off. This effect, known as the serial position effect, or primacy-recency effect, is of particular interest to those who develop technical training.

Incorporating the primacy-recency effect

To best benefit from the primacy-recency effect in your course design, you must abstain from including long, drawn-out lectures in the class. As noted, the primacy-recency effect explains that the learners retention is greatest for information at the beginning and end of a section. Thus, there is a lack of retention for material in the gulf between those two points. The longer the lecture, the greater the gulf between beginning and end. If you want to give learners the best chance to remember something in a class, you need to limit lecture to short segments and provide activities (breaks) in between. These breaks in the lecture function as starting and stopping points, or beginnings and endings, thus giving the learners more of a chance to remember items covered within the lecture portions of the class.

Consider this example. With a three-hour lecture that includes no activities, learners are given only one beginning (primacy effect) and one end (recency effect) through which to remember information. Thus, we are giving learners only two chances to maximize their retention. If, however, that three-hour lecture is roughly broken into half-hour segments interspersed with activities, the learners are given six beginnings and six ends, or a total of 12 opportunities to maximize retention. From this example, it is clear that by segmenting lecture with activities, you are giving learners more beginning and end points at which to remember information.

Activities

It is not difficult to look at the research (and your own experiences) and determine that lectureby itselfdoes not make for an effective course. Activity is crucial for any classroom, especially one with subject matter as difficult and complex as that found in technical training courses. Remember, with activity we are not talking about Lets all get up and stretch or 15 minutes for coffee and bathroom breaks. Were talking about active learning sessionsexercises, group problem solving, or critical thinking sessions that use different learning techniques and engage the learners brains in ways beyond passive listening.

But what kinds of activities are necessary in a training course? The simple answer is any and all that help to meet the course objectives. Research shows it is not so much the specific type of interactivity that is significant, but more that interactivity in general is incorporated into the learning. This interactivity can include worksheets, review questions, group work, presentations, brainstorming, hands-on practicals, or case studies.

Basically, if you have incorporated a variety of learning methods within your class, you have created an effective environment.

Note: This article is excerpted from Technical Training Basics by Sarah Wakefield.

References

Hannum, W. (2009). Training Myths: False Beliefs that Limit the Efficiency and Effectiveness of Training Solutions, Part 1. Performance Improvement 48(2):26-30.

Lalley, J. and R. Miller (2007). The learning pyramid: Does it point teachers in the right direction? Education and Information Technologies 128(1): 64-79.