Presentation to eACH Conference (eLearning Alliance of Canadian Hospitals) on July 8, 2016

1. Seeking Evidence
Using the Science of Learning
to Guide your eLearning Development

2. • Evidence-based learning design
• How we learn
• Principles from the Science of Learning:
– Gaining attention and motivation
– Information design
– Designing meaningful practice
– Making social and informal work
– Learning in organizations
– Myth busting
Agenda

3. Evidence-based medicine
means pairing clinical
judgment with the relevant
scientific evidence and
including your patients’
preferences into making a
decision for your patient.
Evidence-based Medicine

4. Pure and
Applied
Research
Expert
Judgment
from
Experience
Learner
Experience and
Organizational
Impact
EBLD
Evidence-based Learning Design
Evidence-based eLearning
design means pairing your
expert judgment with the
relevant scientific evidence,
learner preferences and
organizational impact
when making design
decisions

5. How We Learn
Short term
memory
Long term
Memory
Plan
Do
Outcome/
Feedback
Attention
Task Environment
Learning Program
Information
Action

6. "If you wanted to create an
education environment that was
directly opposed to what the
brain was good at doing, you
would probably design
something like a classroom."

7. Gaining Attention and Motivation to Learn
“Novel environments sparks exploration and
learning. They motivate us to explore an
environment in the search for reward rather than
being a reward itself."
Pure Novelty Spurs The Brain. Science Daily, 27
August 2006.
“Novelty causes a the dopamine
system to become activated
Dopamine is very much involved in
learning and memory. Learning and
memory occur in the brain through
changes in the way that neurons
connect to one another.
When dopamine is released, it is a
signal to the brain that is it now time
to start learning what is going on”

8. Techniques for Gaining Attention
• Show the big picture
• Creative video demonstrations
• Challenge perceptions
• Tell a story
• Present a work problem or challenge
• Use a novel scenario
• Simulate work processes to create authentic experience
• Completing novel tasks are rewarding. Make tasks clear and
interesting
• Use element of surprise
• Game mechanics
unusual, unfamiliar,
fresh, imaginative,
strange, different,
untried

9. Presenting Information
• Reduce unnecessary processing
• Manage the difficulty of the
learning task
• Create meaningful processing
Managing Cognitive Load
Short term
Memory
Long Term
Memory

10. Types of Cognitive Load
Minimize
Manage
Maximize

11. • Chunk content and allow the learner control (segmenting)
• Remove non-essential content (coherence)
• Use job aids and external resources
• Highlight key concepts and information (signaling)
• Use audio and text elements appropriately
• Place text close as possible to corresponding graphics (spatial
contiguity)
• Don’t narrate on-screen text (redundancy)
• Choose narration over text (modality)
• Conversational style (personalization)
• Consistent structure
• Always connect to the big picture
Ways to Reduce Extraneous Cognitive Load
Mayer, R. E. & Moreno, R. (2003). Nine ways to reduce cognitive load in
multimedia learning. Educational Psychologist. 38, (1), 43-52.

12. Finding the Right Difficulty Level: Intrinsic Cognitive Load

13. Match information presentation strategy to content type
Content Type Information Presentation
Concepts Examples and non- examples
Procedures Demonstrations
Processes Visualizations
Principles Use principles to solve
problems
Behaviour Behaviour Modeling
David Merrill: Component Display Theory
Maximizing Germane Cognitive Load

14. Designing Practice
Expertise is the result of years of effortful,
progressive practice on authentic tasks
accompanied by relevant feedback and
support, followed by self-reflection and
correction

15. Designing Meaningful Practice
• Authentic tasks and context
• Tasks, scenarios and simulations
• Learning from mistakes vs learning mistakes
• Explanatory feedback
• Worked examples
• Varied context
• Scaffolding
• Distributed (vs. massed)
• Increasing difficulty level
• Move practice to the job (the future?)

16. Effective Practice Automates Skill

17. Social and Informal Learning
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: Toward a unified view of working,
learning, and innovation
© 1991, The Institute of Management Sciences
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download doi=10.1.1.530.7851&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Reliance on formal descriptions of work with explicit training to
communicate “one right way” set organizations at a
disadvantage.
It blinds management to the practices and communities that
actually make things happen. It leads to the isolation of
learners, who will then be unable to acquire the implicit
practices required for work

18. Tacit Knowledge and the Development of Expertise
Expert
Proficient
Competent
Advanced
Beginner
Novice
Tacit
Knowledge
Explicit
knowledge
Mental
Models
Disconnected
Knowledge
Rule bound
Intuition
Informal
learning
Formal
learning
Considers
everything
Sees
patterns

19. What Works in Organizations

21. Myth Busting: Learning Styles
“We conclude that there is no adequate
evidence base to justify incorporating
learning styles assessments into
educational practice. Resources would
better be devoted to adopting other
educational practices that have a strong
evidence base”

22. Myth Busting: Net Generation
Net Gen Characteristics
Digital literacy
Always connected
Multitasking
Experiential learning
Prefers structure
Collaboration at work
Social
Goal Oriented
Preference for text
Community minded
Communication preferences
Significant
Difference?
No
No
No
No
No
No
No
Yes
No/Yes (IM)
No
Yes
Digital Learners in Higher Education:
Generation is Not the Issue
Volume 37 Spring 2011

23. http://www-935.ibm.com/services/multimedia/GBE03637USEN.pdf

24. Summary: Design for How we Learn
Short term
memory
Long term
Memory
Plan
Do
Outcome/
Feedback
Attention
Task Environment
Learning Program
Information
Action

25. References
The Role of Dopamine in Motivation and Learning
http://neurosciencenews.com/dopamine-learning-reward-3157/
“Mesolimbic dopamine signals the value of work” by Arif A Hamid, Jeffrey R
Pettibone, Omar S Mabrouk, Vaughn L Hetrick, Robert Schmidt, Caitlin M Vander
Weele, Robert T Kennedy, Brandon J Aragona and Joshua D Berke in Nature
Neuroscience. Published online November 23 2015 doi:10.1038/nn.4173
Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning
http://www.uky.edu/~gmswan3/544/9_ways_to_reduce_CL.pdf
EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST, 38(1), 43–52, 2003, Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, Inc.
Applying the Science of Learning: Evidence-Based Principles for the Design of
Multimedia Instruction
Richard Mayer, November 2008, American Psychologist
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.457.5957&rep=rep1
&type=pdf
Pure Novelty Spurs The Brain
ScienceDaily, 27 August 2006
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/08/060826180547.htm
Mental maps: Route-learning changes brain tissue
Timothy A. Keller, Marcel Adam Just. Structural and functional neuroplasticity in human
learning of spatial routes. NeuroImage, 2015; DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.10.015
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151027123859.htm
The Science of Training and Development in Organizations: What Matters in Practice
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 13(2) 74–101, 2012
Eduardo Salas, Scott I. Tannenbaum, Kurt Kraiger, and Kimberly A. Smith-Jentsch
http://psi.sagepub.com/content/13/2/74.full.pdf+html?ijkey=g8tvuLmoeZfN2&keytype=ref&site
id=sppsi
The 10 Biggest Breakthroughs in the Science of Learning
https://www.brainscape.com/blog/2012/10/breakthroughs-science-of-learning-2/
Learning styles: where’s the evidence?
MEDICAL EDUCATION 2012; 46: 630–635
http://uweb.cas.usf.edu/~drohrer/pdfs/Rohrer&Pashler2012MedEd.pdf
Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence
Psychological Science in the PUBLIC INTEREST Volume 9 Number 3, December 2008
Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3.pdf
David Merrill Component display theory references
http://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/component-display.html
The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance
K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer
Psychological Review, 1993, Vol. 100. No. 3, 363-406
http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf
The Making of an Expert
K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula and Edward T. Cokely
Harvard Business Review July–August 2007
https://hbr.org/2007/07/the-making-of-an-expert
Organizational Learning and Communities of Practice: Toward a unified view or working,
learning and Innovation
John Seely Brown; Paul Duguid
Organization Science, Vol. 2, No. 1,(1991), pp. 40-57.
http://myinstructionaldesigns.com/system/files/articles/brown-duguid-Communities-of-
Practice.pdf

26. References
e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers
and Designers of Multimedia Learning (Mayer and Clark)
https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Science-Instruction-Guidelines-
Multimedia/dp/1119158664/ref=dp_ob_title_bk
Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Brown, Roedigfer, McDaniel)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0674729013/ref=rdr_ext_tmb
Applying the Science of Learning (Richard Mayer)
https://www.amazon.com/Applying-Science-Learning-Richard-
Mayer/dp/0136117570?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc
How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens
(Benedict Carey)
https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Learn-Surprising-
Happens/dp/0812984293?ie=UTF8&ref_=rdr_ext_tmb
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance
https://www.amazon.ca/Cambridge-Handbook-Expertise-Expert-
Performance/dp/0521600812
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise Anders Eriksson
https://www.amazon.ca/Peak-Secrets-New-Science-
Expertise/dp/0544456238/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Evidence-Based Training Methods: A Guide For Training Professionals (Ruth
Clark)
https://www.amazon.ca/Evidence-Based-Training-Methods-Guide-
Professionals/dp/1562869744/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1469477446&
sr=1-1&keywords=ruth+clark+evidence+based
Building Expertise: Cognitive Methods for Training and Performance
Improvement (Ruth Clark)
https://www.amazon.ca/Building-Expertise-Cognitive-Performance-
Improvement/dp/0787988448/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1469541761&sr=
8-1-fkmr0&keywords=ruth+clark+bulding+expertise
The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (Richard Mayer)
https://www.amazon.ca/Cambridge-Handbook-Multimedia-
Learning/dp/1107610311/ref=reader_auth_dp