Quotes from Ruth Colvin Clark

If your goal is to build knowledge and skills, you need to add practice interactions. To decide how much practice your e-learning courses should include, consider the nature of the job task and the criticality of job performance and include more practice for highly critical skills.

Worked examples are illustrations of how to complete a task—either a step-by-step procedural task or a more strategic task that involves critical thinking or problem solving.

Worked examples allow your learners to borrow knowledge. By studying worked examples, learners can emulate how others perform a task.

Using audio to describe a complex visual leverages the dual channels of our limited working memory. While the eyes view a visual, the words that enter the ears access the auditory centers of working memory and thus maximize its limited capacity.

Pilot test your training to determine an optimal amount of practice to reach acceptable job competence. As you plan your practice activities, find ways to spread them over a lesson or course. Spaced practice results in better long-term learning with a high effect size of 0.71.

A recurrent theme through many chapters is: Keep it simple. Whether it comes to visuals, stories, or technology, remember that often less is more.

However, imagine that instead of working a problem, you are reviewing an example. Your working memory is free to carefully study the example and learn from it. In fact, by providing an example as a model, the student has an opportunity to build their own mental model from it. In other words, the example is a vehicle to enable borrowing knowledge acquired by others.

This new edition of the book adds coverage of exciting new research—particularly on animation and video—that has appeared since the previous edition was published in 2003. This new edition also expands coverage of graphics using new media such as mobile learning and virtual worlds. You will also find that this new edition is more concise and visually appealing than the previous edition; yet it retains the same basic structure and message.

Learning games are instructional environments that are entertaining enough to motivate play and educational enough to promote learning goals.

Variously called productive failure, invention learning, or desirable difficulties, the proposed benefits of starting with a problem include: • activating prior knowledge related to new skills • combating student perceptions that the content is easy to learn • creating a moment of need, making students more receptive to explanations.

Practice Guideline 5 Assign comparison practice exercises to build relevant prior knowledge, to correct flawed or incomplete mental models, or to reflect on decisions made in a training scenario.

Examples Guideline 4 Encourage engagement with examples by asking questions or assigning comparisons of worked examples.

To qualify as practice, the learner must make some kind of behavioral response. For the purposes of formal training, that response usually generates a visible product—one that can be evaluated by the instructional environment.

Scenario-based learning, also called problem-based, exploratory, or immersive learning is a popular approach. Scenario-based learning is a preplanned, guided inductive learning environment designed to accelerate expertise.

the injection of personal opinion or reactions to content has been shown to improve learning. For example, an instructor might present two views on an issue and reveal their own personal opinion. Mayer (2009) refers to self-revealing episodes as a "visible author" technique and has found that learning improved with the use of a "visible author.

Whether writing for a text book, for e-learning, or for lecture notes for an instructor-led class, you can improve learning by thinking of yourself as a "learning host." A good host makes guests feel comfortable and engages them in the event.

The agent that exhibited human social behaviors such as gestures and changes in facial expressions promoted best learning. The static agent actually led to less learning than no agent. Perhaps the static agent became a distracting screen element?

Based on their extensive review of evidence, Hattie and others (2017) recommend: "not to mix praise with feedback about the content, as it dilutes the feedback message." When given, praise "needs to be specific, sincere, accurate, earned, preferably unexpected, not exaggerated, more private than public, and not include social comparison.

our brains are designed for best learning when less loaded.

content "covered" does not necessarily translate into new and desirable behaviors on the job.

Feedback is most powerful when it is linked to a goal and it informs the learner how they are progressing toward that goal. Feedback that compares the learner's outcomes to the outcomes of others draws attention to the self and has been shown to reduce motivation for learning.

For most effective learning of strategic tasks, use two or more worked examples that reflect the same guidelines but vary regarding the context.

However, the benefits of spaced practice are apparent after 60 days. Since many training organizations don't evaluate learning over time, the benefits of spaced practice are rarely documented. Based on a lot of accumulated evidence, though, spaced practice will give you a better long-term return.

Rather than an event, learning becomes a process.