Ways to Ensure Reading Comprehension

Reading is probably the #1 thinking skill, yet it has become a lost art.  The ability to read and comprehend is so important for getting ahead in the business world, yet we never receive any formal training in it. If you can read – and comprehend – you pretty much have the key to success.

BUT reading has to be done correctly. Print materials are best. There is a significant difference in comprehension and retention between reading on screen (poor) and reading in print (best). It has to do with neuroscience and the ability to make references and associations between paragraphs, pages, etc.

Here are 5 Tactics for Reading Comprehension

(We will assume you are reading a professional piece such as in a trade journal, newspaper, or text.)

• Read the headings first, to get the main points – think of them as a road map for the readin

• Look at pictures and figures and their explanatory text – they are there to illustrate the points of the text and help you to better comprehend

• There are two benefits to highlighting 1) it means that you were able to separate out the important stuff from the filler and 2) when you need to review and summarize, you’ll be able to skim for the highlighted parts

• Use the margins to give yourself clues to the context, such as: stars for key points, question marks for things you don’t understand or want to look up elsewhere, exclamation points for things that resonate with you (think of it as giving a virtual high-five to the author)

• Write a summary. If you have comprehended what you read, you should be able to write a 3 – 5 sentence summary of the text or explain it to a friend

When you get REALLY good at comprehension, you’ll be able to evaluate and synthesize what you’ve read and integrate it with your own opinions, experiences, or research.  (Hello Adult Learning and Bloom's Taxonomy) Try these tips this week and see if you don’t feel smarter immediately.

Why Testing is Detrimental to Thinking

We all know that just because you've passed a test, you haven't really learned anything (when I passed the test to get my motorcycle permit, I had never even ridden a motorcycle!).

But did you know that testing processes can actually INHIBIT your thinking and learning ability? Read on to learn more...

Do you remember the Scantron bubble sheet from your school days? It's the familiar number-two-pencil- fill-in-the-circle-which-corresponds-to-the-answer-you-have-chosen test. The filled-in card is then run through a computer which compares your bubbles to the correct answers and scoreds your test in mere seconds. When it was first introduced in the 1930's, the Scantron bubble sheet was extremely helpful to teachers and administrators as class sizes grew and record keeping became more stringent.

Unfortunately this technological wonder has been quite detrimental to developing the ability to think for two reasons:

1  Lack of teacher involvement in grading.

Prior to a machine grading tests, teachers had to read each response, giving the answer critical thought. Very often they would add commentary to the grade, rather than simply marking an answer wrong. They might remind the student where the correct information was found or help them to remember how the concept they got wrong was similar to what they were thinking. Sometimes they would give partial credit if the student was on the right track but then veered off before their final summation (this is the only way I passed geometry, believe me). Prior to a machine grading tests, even when a student got an answer wrong - they were learning. They had coaching, correction and refinement from their teacher based on how the teacher graded the test.

Once the Scantron bubble sheet became de rigueur in public school education, students simply received a grade; rarely did you get the bubble sheet back. And, let's be honest, there is no youngster motivated enough to follow through on a wrong answer and figure out why they got it wrong.

2  Everything became a multiple choice test.

The only way for the bubble sheet to work is if every question has only one right answer. Not only did this focus make learning seem easy (just look for the right answer) but it eliminated an individual's need to put any critical thought in to the answer. Essays went by the wayside. “Explain your answer," was no longer the final instruction of a test question. Once the "outcome" only had to be one right answer, it was much easier to look for an answer you could recognize than to pull one up from memory or reason it through.

More complex questions, such as "Using your knowledge of bees and migration, how would you explain the Hylaeus bee species on the island of Hawaii?" became impossible.

You can learn more about the demise of thinking skills - and more importantly, how to solve it - here.

The Limits of Working Memory and Training Effectiveness

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In this fascinating blog post from Patti Shank on the ATD site, she discusses the reasons we can't have a one-size-fits-all approach to training.

Aside from the typical learning styles excuse, Patti explores an interesting point related to neuroscience: knowledge and experience dictates the way we can present the content and further impacts the way the learner is able to work with it.

The crux of the difference is working memory vs. long term memory. When newbies are learning a topic, everything they "know" is in working memory - and they are paddling madly to keep processing and applying that information to the learning process. But when a more knowledgeable or more experienced employee has long-term memory associated with a topic, we can work with that topic in deeper and more meaningful ways for the learner.

This chart is an excellent comparison of working memory approaches to training vs. long term memory approaches.  This chart may cause you to rethink your training designs altogether.

Teaching Thinking through Changing Perspective

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One of the ways you can help people to improve their thinking skills is to ask them  to change their perspective on a topic. To think about it from another point of  view.  This is very easy to do in a training situation - since we have folks captive  and can ask them to try an activity in a way they are not naturally inclined to.

Unfortunately, we often miss this opportunity in training and instead ask our participants  to answer a question based on their own perspective or opinion. For example, how often does your training program ask something along the lines  of: Now that you have read the case study, what are the three main factors affecting  the situation? Since people respond with their own opinion, we never tell them that they are wrong, of course (nor are they wrong), but do we ever conduct "round 2" of the questioning / debrief and ask the learners, What if you were the banker, contractor, pilot in the situation? THEN what would you say are the three most important factors?

Here are two techniques for getting people to change their perspective on a topic:

1. Collaboration - Having learners work in groups is an easy and natural way to  hear more than one perspective. Some care needs to be given to structuring the collaborative activity so that "minority viewpoints" aren't ignored. Perhaps rewarding the group with the most perspectives? Or the most unique perspective?

2. Suggest the other viewpoint - Credit here goes to MindGym and Sebastian Bailey for this simple exercise presented at a conference in 2015.  In this type of activity you'll tell the learner exactly the perspective you want them to take. Bailey's exercise went like this: Close your eyes and picture your living room for 30 seconds.  Now, picture it again, from the perspective of an interior designer. Again, think of your living room, from this perspective, for 30 seconds. Once more, think of your living room, and this time from the perspective of a robber. What are your insights? What do you see differently? What “Ah-ha” moments have you had? What did you "see" as the interior decorator that you didn't see before? What about from the perspective of the robber?

Interestingly, asking people to change the way they view a situation is something  that develops with maturity. It is almost impossible to ask anyone under the age  of 18 to change their perspective on a situation. Once someone IS able to look  at things from various points of view however, it is wise to continually build that muscle and it will expand their thinking abilities in all areas of their life.

Multiple Choice Tests and the Downfall of American Education

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Here is an excerpt from a rather lengthy blog post by Alex Terego. He makes a compelling point about how an educational testing process has had the ripple effect of reducing thinking skills.

In the 1960s schools found a way to grade tests more cheaply by using what we would now consider a rather dumb electronic device. It was an optical character recognition reader. As long as the student used a #2 pencil to fill in ovals the OCR reader could collect and grade the results of a test; a task traditionally performed by the teacher, at much greater cost.

There was just one issue: the OCR could only work if tests were administered in multiple choice formats. This is because an answer to a factual question has a true/false or right/wrong -objective- answer that is universally true. So, the only way to test for retention of factual information was to create tests beginning with "which of the following multiple choices is the true one?". So, the more the curriculum was based on facts the easier it was for the OCR machine to replace the teacher, and take the drudgery of test-taking and grading out of their hands and save money.

If a question or problem needed a student to use facts as just one aspect of developing a subjective opinion, to which there is no universally accepted right or wrong answer, the OCR machine had no value. So, for the past half century, in the name of efficiency and cost-savings we have been preparing students for a personal and employee life where they will be faced with issues that are overwhelmingly about subjective opinions by teaching them how to memorize facts. We opted to teach fact-memorization, and to grade our entire instructional structure based on its results.

You can read his whole post here.

Taking the ME out of SME

In the design work that we do at The Training Doctor, we are more often than not working with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs).Subject Matter Experts are crucial for us to design technically accurate training processes as well as understanding what an expert in a role must be able to do.

Very often these same Subject Matter Experts then become the facilitators of the training because the content is so technical or proprietary. One of the consistent struggles of the SME is recognizing the right perspective. We once heard a SME described as a person who is captivated by "the cool" and the "unique." So, in other words, when training a class of newbies, they might talk about a situation that happened in 2007 that was a real anomaly, but would never happen again. The problem is - a newbie doesn't know that this is non-essential information.

So, one of the practices we have to teach and enforce with Subject Matter Expert facilitators is that the course is not about them. It's not about showing off their expertise or focusing on the topics that are stimulating to them.

What's important is to get a Subject Matter Expert to recognize that when they are acting in the role of facilitator or trainer, the learning is not "all about SME," their focus should be on the learner and what the learner needs to know to be successful on the job.

You're Probably Wondering Why I Invited You To This Training

As our newsletter subscribers know, one of the services The Training Doctor provides is "Training Triage," that is, helping companies to redesign training they already have in place, but which doesn't hit the mark, for some reason.

One of our more recent projects highlighted one of the more typical situations we encounter: there was not much point for the trainees to be there. It was a three-hour class - delivered online - which was strictly lectured. This approach violated a number of learning principles - both general, classroom principles, and more specifically, online learning principles.

One of the easiest ways to determine if you are designing a quality learning experience is simply to ask yourself: What is the audience doing during this class? If the answer is "nothing," then you really have not designed a class at all!

One of the wonderful things about technology is that it freed us from having to bring people together to simply transmit information. We now have the ability to create e-Learning, podcasts or videos which allow for self-study.

So, if your audience is truly doing nothing during your class time, then you need to take "classtime" out of the equation. Look to an alternative means of relaying your content. The adult learning principle that was violated in the course that we were assessing as that it was strictly lectured and there was no purpose to having the learners gathered together. The online learning principle that was violated was that live and online learning should be reserved for those topics which truly benefit from having "minds together."

The benefit of bringing people together is to achieve more creative ideas and benefit from the collaboration and synergy which results from having many thoughts on one topic. A simple question to answer, but a hard objective to achieve: What is the audience doing during this class?

Reading Teaches Thinking Skills

There is no argument that technology has donewondrous things for us over the years. My carlasts longer, my food cooks quicker and I cancall anywhere in the world for pennies if notfor free.One argument that some will make is thattechnology (the web) has also made us smarterdue to our ability to find vast quantities ofinformation - far more than one could find in their local library or - horrors - confinedto one tome.  And isn't more always better?Another argument is that technology allows us to retrieve information at lighteningspeeds. Have a question or concern? Look it up. Think you might have malaria? Aquick web-search returns 10 very authoritative sources of information about thedisease.A third argument is that this vast "library" of information, available at ourfingertips, allows us to learn from entities we would never have heard of or hadaccess to in the past. How else would we have learned of the Handbook of MusicalDevelopment published by Oxford University Press?These are all very compelling - and true - arguments... to a degree.The "pro" pundits overlook the fact that having information and making meaning fromthat information are very different. There is also the risk of interpreting opinionas fact and limiting one's "research" to the first answer that is returned or theone that seems most popular (because everybody thinks this way).The Training Doctor is challenging organizations to get back to basics. Readingfor comprehension is a basic, yet seldom-used skill.Being able to read critically instead of skimming for factoids requires one to assessthe words that are used, the logic of the argument, or the validity of one opinionover another.The skills of logic, reasoning, extrapolation, and synthesis are critical to runningbusinesses, yet we rarely, if ever, teach or encourage people to learn these skillsthrough our L+D efforts. (If you have an example of a curriculum that DOES teachthese skills - please send it along!)After purposeful and thought-provoking reading assignments, we need to ask Socraticquestions (see article #1) such as, Do you agree with the validity of this argument/premise? Why or why not? How does this compare to this other author / theory? Howcan you incorporate this new information into your day-to-day responsibilities?What are the risks (or rewards) of ignoring this information?  What economic,societal, or technological impacts could change this premise?The possibilities for stretching people's thinking abilities are endless.  But don'tbe overwhelmed. Let's just start with this one: Assign purposeful reading assignmentsas part of your L+D curriculums and begin to require learners to truly think aboutwhat they are reading.

The Next "Generation" of Learning

Generation means that people need to make their own meaning, literally generating their own links while learning, not just passively listening to ideas. We need our brains to create rich webs of links to any new concept, linking ideas to many parts of the brain.

Using different types of neural circuitry to link to an idea is the key. Meaning, we should be listening, speaking, thinking, writing, and other tasks about any important ideas.

Source: Your Brain on Learning, published in Chief Learning Officer, May 2015

Thinking Through Instructional Design Choices (Tailored Learning book excerpt)

Depending on the delivery method, designers must consider how these choices influence design, desired impact on the job, and any assessment plan.

Design Implications

Different delivery methods will change the design of the course. A classroom-based course can be very interactive and can include group activities in the design. However, an asynchronous would determine whether the interaction or activity is crucial to the learning, and if not, then determine how the same learning outcome could be achieved by an independent learner.

Impact on the Job

Ultimately, any training program should enable participants to return to their jobs and implement what they have learned during the training. To accomplish this, the learning must be designed in a way that is immediately applicable on the job, and the participant must be motivated to use the new knowledge and skills.

For example, in a classroom-based training course, a follow-on activity might be for the facilitators to check in with the participants once a week to see what kind of success they are having implementing their new knowledge and skills back on the job, as well as to offer support and coaching. However, if the training course is designed to be offered asynchronously, the coaching may have to be offered by the participant's sales manager or more senior salesperson in the office. While the same objective can be met, the methodology for meeting that objective might be quite different.

 The Assessment Plan

If the ultimate goal is to have an individual return to the job prepared to implement new knowledge and skills, then there should be some way of assessing whether the training has been successful in accomplishing that goal. Similar to on-the-job considerations, assessment approaches might differ depending on how the training is delivered. Therefore, the assessment for each objective will be defined once the training approach has been determined.

Adults Need Time for Real World Application

Real World Application

Trainees need to return to their jobs behaving differently than when they went into the training; therefore workplace training relies on 'real world application.' Unfortunately, most training designs don't allow for real-world application. They include a lot of theory or rules (we pre-qualify a sales lead so that we don't waste our time pursuing someone who will never buy), practice in a fabricated manner (work with a partner to create or practice the pre-qualifying questions you would use back on-the-job), stories of successes (Jim, our star salesperson, spends 80% of his time pre-qualifying and only 20% making sales), and sometimes a checklist or job-aid reminder of the process / steps we have taught.

Is this how you would teach someone to ride a bike (Let's hear from Mike, who has experience in bike riding) or counsel a drug addict (Work with a partner to come up with some questions you might ask the patient)? No. But far too often this is the "design" we see in corporate training programs.

The point?  Training, in order for it to stick and be sustained, must include real world application so that people understand what the task or process is and how they would actually perform it on the job.  We know about chunking, we know about timed-intervals, now we need to also embrace real-world application. 

Have trainees go back on the job and actually practice what they have been taught - BEFORE the training is over.  Give them time to practice and fail and report back on what they have learned. Give them time to try two or three techniques to see which they are most comfortable with. It's much smarter to learn from one's own experience than Jim's or Mike's.

Training Design with Adults in Mind

There are a few techniques you can use to make learning easier on your workplace learners:

Structure - helps learners to keep track of detail; give them an agenda to follow-along

• Known to unknown - Flying a plane to flying a helicopter

• Easy to difficult - Painting with a brush to painting with a roller to painting with a power painter

• Problem to solution - Getting lost to learning to read a map or compass

• Frequent to infrequent - Running weekly payroll to running monthly invoices to running yearly W-2's*

• Overview to detail - This is how government works to this is how an election is conducted

• Theoretical to practical (big picture to doing your job) - The importance of eating right to planning menus

• Order of importance or performance - Checking safety of machinery before operating it

• Steps in a sequence (chronological) - Filling out a form; validating customer information

• How participants would most likely interact with material - Teach blackjack by sitting at a blackjack  table, not reading a manual

Exercises - are very effective, unless...

• "Unusual" or complex exercises interfere with learning - learners may miss the point

• Adults don't like far-fetched or artificial exercises - respect their maturity

• Need some challenge (but not too much) - remember to keep the environment safe

• Stories-are "sticky" - stories help learners to remember. Anytime you are about to go in to lecture mode, ask yourself, "Is there a story I could tell that would illustrate this just as well?" and then, at the end of the story, ask your learners "So what is the moral of this story?" THAT is when the true learning comes about; give the audience time to process the point of the story and draw a conclusion - otherwise it was an interesting story that happened to somebody else.

Keep 'em active! - nobody sits for hours on end at the job - don't expect it in training either.