Did you have trouble the first time you tried to start a keyless car? Or perhaps the first time you took a panoramic picture? According to a well-known theory, these tasks were difficult because you … [Read more...]
Design for Bottom-Up and Top-Down Processing
In order to design for the human mind, it's helpful to understand how attention guides a person to perceive and then comprehend information while learning. Outside of research circles, one under … [Read more...]
20 Things To Remember About Forgetting
What Causes Us To Forget
Even though we use it all day and night, we are usually not aware of our memory's processes until they fail. Yet remembering and forgetting are crucial aspects of learning. In learning design, it's … [Read more...]
Strategies For Tacit Knowledge Transfer
What is Tacit Knowledge? Can you explain all of the skills necessary to be an effective leader? What about the skills needed to create an innovative design? There are aspects of these skills that are … [Read more...]
What makes someone an expert?
The Cognitive Psychology of Expertise
The purpose of most long-term learning experiences is to move an individual from a state of little proficiency in a skill to one of competence or even expertise. But what makes someone an expert? … [Read more...]
How To Be Effective At Persuasion For Learning
Do you ever use persuasion in learning experiences? Although the persuasion may be subtle, I'm guessing the answer is yes. Whether implicit or explicit, we often attempt to influence the attitudes and … [Read more...]
Novice Versus Expert Design Strategies
The Expertise Reversal Effect
Common sense tells us that we should design differently for novices than for experts. Wouldn't you expect a novice swimmer to learn new strokes differently than an advanced swimmer? What might not be … [Read more...]
Elaboration Strategies That Benefit Learning
Making Connections to Prior Knowledge
Although retrieval practice and spaced learning may be more well-known, elaboration is an instructional strategy worth our attention. Elaboration strategies refer to the many ways of connecting prior … [Read more...]
How Visual Clarity Affects Learning
Research on Processing Fluency
How do you react when you see a very complex diagram or a screen of dense text? Are you motivated to work through it? Or do you groan and turn away if it becomes too difficult? Complex or dense … [Read more...]
Long-Term Memory: A User’s Guide
When you're designing learning experiences, long-term memory is the ultimate destination. It's the promised land—where you want newly learned skills and information to integrate with a person's … [Read more...]
Emotions and Learning Part III
10 Ways To Design For Emotions
. It's quite clear from research on emotional design for learning, that we can generate connections using the right instructional strategies and creative treatments. These have the potential to … [Read more...]
Emotions and Learning: Part II
How Emotions Affect Learning
According to research studies, emotions have an effect on many of the processes of learning. Emotions are an influence on perception, attention, motivation, and the encoding and … [Read more...]