In my last post I spoke about creating high-stress situations for your students in order to ensure that the appropriate level of knowledge-transfer has happened so they can critically think through a problem-set. Now that was a lot of human performance improvement words to simply state the fact that a teacher can absolutely create situations for their students that will mimic real-life stress and chaos, before they encounter it on the job outside of a training scenario.
I promised a research backed response to the last post and that is my goal with this post. Specifically, we will cover the training requirements prior to PBL and the reasoning behind the controlled stress environments.
First, I stated that prior to entering into these high-stressed scenarios that you need to ensure your student has a basis of knowledge to build off of. (Clark, 2008) The main idea in leading up to these tasks is mainly to ensure that your students are completing part-task practices that mirror the job tasks that they will be expected to perform.
In the beginning this may look like far transfer to the students. What is far transfer though? Far transfer involves teaching skills and knowledge that are not commonly known or that the learner has no solid basis to relate the skills or knowledge to. An example of far transfer would be knowing that every door has a lever handle or a knob handle and knowing how to open it. But now, you encounter a door that has neither. (Matthews, 2018) Since you have only ever learned that doors have handles and they are either knobs or levers you are presented with a problem that must be solved. You know that it is a door. You know that the door must open and close. But it appears to have absolutely no way to open or close based on your knowledge thus far.
What does a door have to do with anything John? Well, if you were to re-structure your training around the above examples we can see some learning gaps. Well, I can… and I’ll just tell you what I see from the above example. The issue is that the instructor never taught the student what the handle actually does except for open and close the door. But did we ever get into the “how” it opens and closes the door? Did we discuss and learn that the lever actually actions a mechanical mechanism inside of the door to maneuver a latch that will allow the door to swing freely? Did we teach the different parts of the door like the hinges, the latch mechanism, the complicated lock mechanism? It doesn’t appear like we did in the example above but imagine if you had… so now if you had basically built a door with your student and shown them how it all goes together and the “why” behind each and every part do you think your student would be more capable of solving the problem of the door with no latch? If you don’t think so, I guess I need to figure out how to draw pictures on this blog… but let me illustrate with words.
A properly trained student encounters a door with what appears to be no handle at all. They recognize that it is in fact a door and not just a continuation of a wall. They begin to solve the problem of how to open it. So, they begin to look for hinges to see if it is a swinging door or a sliding door. They continue to look for a mechanism that is keeping it from currently opening (a latch) and find a small button beside the door. They press the button, hear the latch disengage audibly and the door swings open.
Look at that, part tasks of building the door, lead to enough baseline skills to solve a problem when they encounter it. The far-transfer was actually turned into near transfer based purely on the skills you trained them on prior to!
Summarizing that portion of my theory; the objective for you as an instructor in teaching critical thinking under high stress utilizing problem-based learning, is to reduce the cognitive load that your student encounters at the moment they need to solve a problem in a high stress environment. Those smaller lessons that are still job focused (the parts of the door and the why behind the components) are how we build the student’s “toolkit” towards critical thinking. These smaller lessons are known as “chunking” for instructional designers and human performance professionals.
Cognitive load theory says that the amount of information and interactions that must be processed simultaneously can either under or overload a finite amount of working memory. (Quora, 2017) So, what does that have to do with chunking? Well George Miller, a Harvard graduate, published a paper in 1956 postulating that people can only handle between five to nine pieces of information at a time with seven being the mean. (Quora, 2017) If you put all of this together you will eventually get to a conclusion that in order to reduce the cognitive load on your students and create effective and efficient learning you need to chunk the lessons into smaller realistic scenarios that build on each other which allow for repetition and proficiency. So, tie this cognitive load theory, along with chunking and you have the reasoning behind these smaller lessons as you build up towards higher stress scenarios.
Some human performance professionals will state that there is a difference between training and stress training. (Driskell & Johnston, 2008) I tend to agree with these professionals based on everything that is written above. Stress training is that training specifically designed to ensure that a certain level of performance is maintained in high-stress environments. (Driskell & Johnston, 2008) In every publication I have researched about “Stress Exposure Training or SET” or Stress Inoculation (a medical term) there is a phased approach to implementing it. Driskell and Johnston, state that they have a three phased approach to SET which are Information, Skills Acquisition, and Application. (Driskell & Johnston, 2008)
In application, it is extremely difficult to throw all the stress at your student at once in their first look at the problem set. That is the reasoning for my different methods of stress inoculation. From what I have researched so far, not a single article has been published stating the type of stressors and the reasoning behind enacting them at various points of a scenario. So, what you may have in that portion of my article is some original content from yours truly. The importance of the design must be maintained in the instructional designer and teachers mind the entire time. There is no malicious intent with these scenarios. The overall intent of these high-stress scenarios are to ensure that your student can effectively and efficiently perform these tasks at the time and place that it is most important.
References
Clark, R. C. (2008). Building Expertise: Cognitive Methods for Training and Performance Improvement (3rd ed.). San Francisco: Pfeiffer.
Driskell, J. E., & Johnston, J. H. (2008). Stress Exposure Training. In P. A. James Szalma, Performance Under Stress (p. 16). London: CRC Press.
Matthews, P. (2018, March 26). Near and Far Transfer of Learning. Retrieved April 8, 2022, from Training Journal: https://www.trainingjournal.com/print/5768
Quora. (2017, November 8). Consumer Tech: What Makes Chunking Such An Effective Way to Learn? Retrieved from Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/11/08/what-makes-chunking-such-an-effective-way-to-learn/?sh=7ef7e87560a9
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