If training efficiency and retention are one of your concerns, this article will be of interest to you because it describes how memory works and presents how to use memory triggers for effective trainings.
This article is a follow-up of the article “A presentation is not training” and presents more in-depth the importance and the methods of building “memorable” content for trainings.
- How memory works
- Memory triggers
- Importance of memory triggers in trainings
- How to create triggers for effective trainings?
STATEMENT:
In each training there are 2 important sources of information that get to the trainees’ minds:
“what you say” AND “what you show”.
Which one, do you think, is the most important for obtaining effective training?
How memory works
EXPLANATION:
Learning “involves skills for reconstructing memories based on past experiences and cues in the present environment, rather than reproducing copies of an experience” (How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures)
This means that memories are not saved instances of the received information. Memories are reconstructed anew each time a person recalls that information, or that event.
Memories are instances of the information at the moment of recall and it is influenced by context. For this reason, memories are not fixed and can be distorted. Because we cannot remember every aspect of an event/information, we will remember those elements that are of the most significance to us and we will fill in the gaps with our own narrative.
Here I will use an association in order to provide a visual representation of the memory. Do not think about memories as a picture filling in a cabinet drawer. But as a puzzle picture, which is made up of many pieces that are stored in different drawers.
Looking at the topic from the cognitive science perspective, where learning means building a mental model of the outside world. This means that a mental model is not a perfect copy of the world but rather a partial record of the individual subjective perception and interpretation of the world. The factors that influence subjective perception and interpretation are prior knowledge of the topic, prior experiences, perceptual capabilities, and how it links or doesn’t link the new information to the existing one.
Memory triggers
We do not measure learning by how much information we have attended but by how much information we can retrieve. Also, efficient training is not measured by how long is the training but by how good and how much the employees can apply later on in their tasks.
To conclude: it does not matter how many hours you spent in training but how much information you remember later on. The process of remembering is also called retrieval. Retrieval means the process of reconstructing memories of past experiences and is guided by retrieval cues from the learner’s environment. Retrieval cues are what we simply call memory triggers.
“Knowledge must be “conditionalized” in order to be retrieved when it is needed; otherwise, it remains inert” (Whitehead,1929).
And here comes the response to my question: what do you think, is the most important for obtaining efficient learning between: “what you say” AND “what you show”?
The answer is “AND”!
The combination/the interplay between what you say AND what you show constitutes the retrieval cues that make an impression on the trainees’ minds.
Examples of memory triggers are questions, prompts, examples, associations, and problems to be solved that are presented during a training session. Or ideas, thoughts, pictures, or explanation videos that have some relationship to the topic to be memorized.
Importance of memory triggers in trainings
This skill, to be able to reconstruct memories based on cues in the environment, is crucially important for the trainees. But even more important for trainers because they must support it by planting memory triggers for efficient training. This helps trainees to remember more elements or more precisely the important elements and enable accurate memory reconstruction.
EXPERIMENT
To underline the importance of retrieval cues I will present the results of the study by Anderson and Pichert (1978). Their students were asked to read a story telling a series of events happening in a house. Then they had to recall the details of the story from different perspectives. Like the perspective of the burglar and the perspective of a person who wants to buy the house.
What do you think happened when they shifted perspective?
After shifting perspectives, the students recalled new information that they did not recall the first time. Although students have encoded the same information when reading the text, when the retrieval conditions changed, the reconstructed memories were slightly different. This is the power of memory triggers and context.
IMPACT
“Memory involves reconstruction rather than retrieval of exact copies of encoded mental representations. The cues available in a learner’s environment are critical for what she will be able to recall; they also play a role in the way the learner begins to integrate new information as knowledge.” (How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures)
How to create triggers for effective trainings?
1.Use memory triggers in trainings’ visual presentation
In order to retrieve correctly and with as many details as possible the whole information that has to be learned, the training has to contain many powerful and specific memory triggers (retrieval cues). Those will help and guide the trainees to recall the information and reconstruct it.
How do we ensure, at AUTOMATED TRAINING, that your trainings contain memory triggers for effective trainings?
When we structure or prepare your training content (no matter if it is digital or presence training), we synchronize in a cognitive way, what you say with what you show in your training. We use the visual part of your training to show the memory triggers. Because the inputs from each of the sense modalities register in different areas of the brain (information-processing system), they are pulled together in what are called association areas and contribute to the unified experience.
2.Examples of memory triggers
“The retrieval cues available in a learner’s environment are critical for what she will be able to recall, and changing the retrieval context and cueing environment changes what a person expresses at any given moment in time.” (Endel Tulving and Thomson Donald M, 1973. Psychological Review: “Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory”. )
One example of such a memory cue is “patterns of inputs”. Those can be visual, motor, auditory, or emotional. In the case of technical topics, which are less emotional, we create logical sequences or logical narration patterns. Those we keep for the duration of the whole training. And what happens is that the brain recognizes the pattern after a while and it engages with it by predicting what will follow. As a second effect, this will keep the trainees engaged during the training.
One negative example: bullet points in PowerPoint presentations are NOT memory triggers. The biggest mistake when presenting information is to show it as a list of bullet points, as I see in many technical presentations.
What kind of information delivers a bullet point enumeration?
- The number of elements to be remembered?
- The relation between the elements?
- How they interact or interconnect?
- Their order of execution? The importance or priority?
- The flow of information?
- The duration or the cyclicity with which is performed?
None of them. And if you look at my list of bullet points you will notice that it does not even showcase how many elements are to be remembered. You don’t have a rough idea about the number of elements, unless you start counting them. A bit better than using bullet points is using numbers. But it is just a little bit better, not perfect, and still not learning-oriented.
3. Visual memory triggers
“Organizing items to be remembered into related groups makes them easier to retain as does forming strong mental images of the information” (How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures)
The best visual representation of the information to be learned are dedicated diagrams/draws that showcase the following properties (of the elements of the topic):
- Dimension/Proportion/Size/Quantity
- Relation/Correlation/Dependencies
- Interactions/Interconnections
- Priority/Order/Sequence/Flow
- Duration / Timing / Cyclicity
When we create visual structures for technical topics we analyze the topic from all these points of view and we create the visual representation or visual representations that contain all the necessary details. And we present them in the order that matches the “input pattern” that the brain is waiting for.
If you need support with the preparation of training or to create a visual representation of technical training, contact us!
