Education, Training, Objectives, and Outcomes

BY CLARK QUINN

Why do we learn? In general, we learn to be able to do new things. That could be just knowing the response to a question, but it could be more. We could want to know how to improve our ability at a sport, craft, or hobby. We could need to learn to be able to do something for our organization or family, such as make transactions, or administer medications. We have lots of reasons. Do we also have lots of mechanisms?

Two major approaches are education and training. One is characterized by ‘school’, the other in organizations. Both are charged to develop abilities. Yet, that seems to not be the case. While the motivations differ, the underlying results are largely the same, and largely undesirable. What am I talking about, and what should we do?

Education

To start with education, a flip response is “the only things wrong with education in this country are the curriculum and the pedagogy, other than that it’s fine.” Ed Hirsch wrote a book, Cultural Literacy, arguing that there were fundamental references members of a culture needed to know. And I really don’t disagree, but to me it’s more than ‘know’.

Cognitive science talks about ‘inert knowledge’, things you can pass a test on, but won’t get activated when it’s relevant in the real world. That, to me, is the flaw of a curriculum focused on knowledge, not skills. And that is, I suggest, the problem with our current curriculum.

The late Roger Schank repeatedly railed against our current areas of focus in learning. For instance, I’ve heard him waxing eloquent about the quadratic equation as an example. When he’d ask “how many learned it”, everyone would raise their hands. When he’d ask “how many have ever used it”, you’d be surprised if there were one or two hands up. The point being, we learn lots of things because we’re supposed to. Yet we should be learning things we need to be able to do as citizens (like balance our accounts, and voting).

The pedagogy is wrong too. Malcolm Knowles, in his proposal for ‘andragogy’, suggests that adults learn differently than kids, implying that it’s ok to teach kids by rote. Yet our learning architecture doesn’t change when we hit puberty, and we all benefit from having learning that’s aligned to our interests, active, and more. David Preston has aptly pointed out that a cup of tea is a study in ceramics, botany, fluid mechanics, and a history of world cultures and colonialism. We have the ability to wrap learning around interests, instead of precluding them. We can do better.

Training

Training, on the other hand, is focused on developing specific skills. It should, therefore, be more aligned with what it takes to achieve learning. We have a more focused curriculum, surely we do the same with the pedagogy? What do we see?

Actually, it’s not far-fetched to note that, at least too frequently, our curriculum is off. For instance, we all often see requests for courses. There’s an implicit belief that the course will address some perceived ill, but too little effort to ascertain it. It’s also the case that experts literally can’t tell us what they know, as research by Richard Clark and others has demonstrated. Without this awareness, instructional designers can work to get learning objectives but they’ll be misfocused on knowledge, not skills.

Which leads to a second problem: the pedagogy. Too often, even if we have objectives that are specifically addressed at the problem, the solution is to present information, not develop skills. There’s some evidence that it’s a legacy of believing we’re logical beings (we’re not, as for instance the work of Daniel Kahneman shows). Regardless, the learning approach is, too frequently, information presentation and knowledge test. Back to ‘inert knowledge’!

From Knowledge to Performance

The result of the above is that our learning objectives are focused on knowledge, not performance. We’re not developing skills, when we can and should be. True, we need foundational knowledge; as the late Jeroen Van Merri?nboer has said, there’s the knowledge, and then the complex problems we apply it to. However, Pooja Agarwal has shown that we don’t need to test the knowledge, instead we can (and should) test the ability to use the knowledge to solve the problems. (Implicit is the required knowledge retrieval.)

Further, as Guy Wallace, amongst others, has told us, we should be focusing first on the outputs folks need to generate, the tasks that generate those outcomes, and then the skills that allow one to complete the tasks. When we do so, we align the skills with the need.

In short, the problem is that we’re too often running off of knowledge objectives, and we should be using performance objectives. Robert Mager’s approach to objectives is a bit behaviorist in philosophy, but still apt when it comes to determining whether a training has achieved the necessary outcomes. He stipulated that objectives should have:

? Performance: that learners need to do

? Conditions: that the task is performed in

? Criteria: that determines the success of the performance

This provides a very clear statement of the necessary goals.

How do we differentiate objectives from outcomes? To me, objectives are what the learning needs to accomplish. Outcomes are the benefits from the task being accomplished accurately. The focus on outcomes leads to a necessary focus on appropriate objectives. And we should be focusing on outcomes: what do learners need to be able to do?

This holds for both education and training. For education, why do learners need to know algebra? To solve problems? Then give them practice solving real problems where algebra is necessary. What are the things citizens need to be able to do as members of society? That should guide our curriculum. Similarly, for organizations; what do people need to be able to do? Then develop learning that enables them to do it. And test to ensure that they are, and that it’s making a difference.

That’s our goal, making a difference. We can’t do it if we don’t understand the underlying learning science principles. We can’t do it if we don’t apply them in ways that align with our understanding. And we can, and should.

References

Agarwal, P.K. (2019). Retrieval Practice & Bloom’s Taxonomy: Do Students Need Fact Knowledge Before Higher Order Learning? Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol. 111 (2), 189–209.

Clark, R. E. and Estes, F. (1996). Cognitive task analysis, International Journal of Educational Research. 25(5). 403-417.

Hirsch, E. D. (1987).? Cultural Literacy: What every American Needs to Know.? Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Knowles, M. S. (1984). Andragogy in Action. Applying Modern Principles of Adult Education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

Mager, R. (1975). Preparing Instructional Objectives (2nd Edition). Belmont,? CA: Lake Publishing Co.

Preston, D. (2021). Academy of One: The Power and Promise of Open-Source Learning. Larham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Quinn, C. N. (2021). Learning Science for Instructional Designers: From Cognition to Application. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.

Schank, R. & Cleary, C. (1995). Engines for Education. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Associates.

Wallace, G.W. (2023). The L&D Pivot Point: Performance Improvement Consulting - Pivot From Instructional Development Efforts to Non-Instructional Development Efforts or to do Both. Boston: LDA Press.