Ingenious Ways to Improve Learner Retention
As instructional designers, we focus on improving employee performance through knowledge and an increased skill set. We strive for learners to retain what they learn and implement it in their jobs.
Yet, with so many competing demands at work and home, retaining what we learn can be easier said than done. For the instructional designer, any guide or “rules” to increase learner retention could really help.
Most recently, I have found such a guide in the book Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, which describes six sticky principles to incorporate in our ideas and educational material, to make them more memorable and meaningful. I felt so strongly about this book that I made it the cornerstone of EnVision’s 15th EnVisioning our Future team workshop, held this past December.
The first principle we learned at the workshop was simple, or summarizing the essential core of your idea. Nike’s slogan, Just Do It, is a good example of this. Alternatively, the second principle happens to be unexpected, which means surprising people to get their attention. By invoking the senses or enhancing a scenario with details, one uses the concrete principle of stickiness. Appealing to emotion or inserting credible facts/testimonials will also help learners retain material. Finally, introducing a story and carrying it through a training workshop, book, or any other creative endeavor can also help concepts to stick.
After learning about these basic principles in the workshop, we broke into teams to analyze an instructional design case study, finding ways to improve our chosen course using these elements of “stickiness.” In my group, we found ourselves brainstorming original instructional design methods for a financial management course at a major Boston hospital.
While sound financial management is clearly important, the challenge lies in making this material engaging for the learner so s/he retains it. Between three of us, we thought of several ideas to make financial management “stick.” As an example of the concrete principle, an old-fashioned weighted scale could represent the importance of having accounts balance. An easy-to-remember slogan (“haste makes waste” relates to financial management) provides an overarching theme for a learner’s performance improvement and illustrates the simple concept.
Finally, our team recommended that the story principle could help show the learners the degree to which hospitals rely on sound financial management. The trainer could share a story of a hospital that budgeted well, and one that did not, and the consequences of each scenario, while following this story throughout the training. The relevance of a real-life scenario brings the material alive for the learners, placing it in a larger perspective. “…people care more about individuals (or individual hospitals, to paraphrase) than they do about abstractions,” write the Heath brothers in the epilogue of Made to Stick.
I found Made to Stick a novel way of looking at my field of instructional design. Even better, these principles can be applied to the fields of marketing, writing, and more. The Heath brothers have given us all a valuable framework to “raise the bar” and provide more value-add to our learners.