Can Learning Change Behaviors?

In the past few months, I’ve heard many times that learning can’t change behaviors. I mentioned this to a colleague of mine, and he said, “That’s what learning is.” Upon hearing this, I realized in all my years in the learning industry, I’ve never looked up the actual definition of learning.

According to the Dictionay.com app on my phone, there are 4 definitions of learning (all nouns).

1. The act or process of acquiring knowledge or skill
2. Knowledge acquired by systematic study in any field of scholarly application
3. Psychology: the modification of behavior through practice, training, or experience
4. Usually learnings: something that is learned through education or experience

Those definitions tell me that learning can make you knowledgeable AND learning can change behavior. Since I started designing and developing corporate learning many, many years ago (you can look at my profile to guess how long), I’ve only created learning that changes behaviors, such as simulations. The learning that only results in knowledge and not application I tended to refer to as passive learning, such as: videos, lectures, podcasts, and training that only asks questions around knowledge. Most of the people in my world were also very clear on active versus passive learning.

Depending on your budget, timeline, and goals both types of learning have a place in your learning offerings. However, if you want to change behaviors, then you have to create learning that fits in definition 3 above. How do you do this?

The differences I have found between learning that gives you knowledge and learning that truly changes behaviors are in:

• How the objectives are written – learning that changes behaviors have objectives that are measurable, meaning you can physically see/experience the behavior and you can rate how well or often someone exhibits the behavior
• Having activities that allow for active practice with the behavior, whether via simulation, game, or other hands-on approaches

Creating measurable objectives and activities that give your participants hands-on practice with those objectives takes time, and depending on the activities, budget. I promise the time will be worth it. Whether creating an event, a web app, or a course, you have to define the right requirements or objectives to get the result you want.

What is your process for creating objectives for a course? And, are your objectives measurable – can I see someone exhibiting those objectives? What types of active learning have you created?

Added bonus for creating measurable objectives: You can improve your learning analytics, as now, you have objectives that can be rated, since they can be seen or measured in some way, to determine the success and effectiveness of your learning experience!