3 essential keys to move from memorization to application in eLearning training

The transition from the memorization of concepts to their application and mobilization in situations is not automatic and must be considered as soon as a training course is designed.‍

You are coming out of your accounting training where you taught your participants the principles of calculating VAT. But once they get back to work, will your learners be able to check if the correct rate is applied to the last invoice received? This crucial question is that of learning transfer, i.e. the number of different contexts in which your learners are able to mobilize the concepts learned during training. The greater the transfer of learning, the more numerous and varied are these contexts! The transfer is in a way the ultimate objective of all vocational training... But how can we approach it?

Whether you are a trainer or in charge of training in your organization, here are 3 keys that we apply at Didask so that your learners transfer their learning with flying colors.‍

The specificity of learning, a scourge of trainers

There are many courses that help learners progress at the moment, but after which The learners are unable to apply what they have learned. This problem, well known to researchers, is that of the specificity of learning: knowledge is present in their memory, but they cannot detect when and how to mobilize it in a different context of the one in which it was learned.
This pitfall threatens even the formations that seem to be the most promising. Take brain training software as an example, or”Braintraining”. These programs are a series of small games designed to improve the major mechanisms of our cognition such as memory, attention, logical reasoning and many others. Directly inspired by standardized psychological tests, they are sometimes presented as “based on neurosciences”.

Studies have therefore been conducted to verify this hypothesis (1). One of them proposed a 16-hour brain training program to half of the 135 employees of an Australian public institution, the other half having received a so-called “control” program that is not supposed to have an effect on cognitive abilities. During the training, we realize that the employees have indeed progressed, a sign that an apprenticeship has indeed taken place. But does this improvement persist outside of the game? The experimenters gave employees cognitive performance tests and measures of the level of well-being in real situations. Unfortunately, no difference was found between those who played the brain training program and those who played the control program. Contrary to what was hoped for and despite all the guarantees that this program based on neuroscience could provide, the improvement observed in the game did not transfer to the workplace...
The transition from memorizing concepts to applying them in a situation is therefore not automatic and must be thought out from the design of your training.

The 3 keys to improving learning transfer

Fortunately, the specificity of learning is not inevitable! Here are three keys to use to improve the learning transfer of the concepts you want to transmit:

1. Put in a situation

Suggesting to your learners to actively mobilize the concepts they have just learned makes it possible to create a link between this and the knowledge already present in memory (2) (see our article to discover the other benefits of role-playing). The more these connections there are, the more “paths” in memory that can be taken to find this concept when the situation requires it (3).

Example of application: Situational simulation is the basis of our educational format. In training Recruiting without discrimination, created with The Didask solution, we confront learners with situations in which they must actively mobilize their knowledge to make a decision.

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2. Vary contexts and examples

When we learn a concept, we store in memory both its meaning and the context in which it was learned. The more we vary the contexts in which a concept is learned, the more we will be able to identify in a new situation the elements that suggest to us that we must mobilize this concept. (4).

Application example: In our digital training preventing corruption, one of our educational goals was to help the learners to detect gifts offered that were out of limits (see Sapin 2 law). We therefore proposed several scenarios where a fictional character received gifts, whose properties were varied (amount of the gift, context in which it is offered, etc.) and the learner having to decide whether or not this gift was admissible.

3. Systematize Feedback adapted

You can reinforce the positive influence of scenarios on the transfer of learning by giving your learners feedback on their performance (3). These will allow them either to reinforce a state of knowledge, or to give them the information to correct themselves. This makes it possible to avoid phenomena of “illusion of mastery”, where the learner thinks he has mastered the concept in question, when in reality this is not the case.

An example of application: MCQ may seem completely outdated, wrongly because it allows precise feedback associated with each learner's response.

Precaution to take: Be careful that your feedback does not praise the intelligence of your learners, studies suggest that this would be counterproductive! On the other hand, it is wise to encourage the efforts made. (5)

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To conclude...

These three points must be applied without moderation so that the transfer the skills acquired by your learners extend to all the areas in which they will be useful. Moreover, if today many authoring tools or eLearning platforms such as that of Didask, give you the means to integrate these recommendations, it is up to you to think about including them in the design of your content. It's up to you to play!

REFERENCES

(1) Borness, C., Proudfoot, J., Proudfoot, J., J., & Valenzuela, M. (2013). Putting brain training to the test in the workplace: a randomized, blinded, multisite, active-controlled trial. PLOS one, 8 (3), e59982.
(2) Wing, E.A., Marsh, E.J., & Cabeza, R. (2013). Neural correlates of retrieval-based memory enhancement: an fMRI study of the testing effect. Neuropsychology, 51 (12), 2360-2370.
(3) Pan, S.C., & Rickard, T.C. (2018). Transfer of test-enhanced learning: Meta-analytic review and synthesis. Psychological bulletin, 144 (7), 710.
(4) Kemp, C., Goodman, N.D., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2010). Learning to learn causal models. Cognitive Science, 34 (7), 1185-1243.
(5) Mueller, C.M., & Dweck, C.S. (1998). Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation and Performance. Journal of personality and social psychology, 75 (1), 33.