Accelerated Learning: Training for High Proficiency in a Complex World (Expertise: Research and Applications Series) - Robert R. Hoffman Paul Ward Paul J. Feltovich Lia DiBello Stephen M. Fiore Dee H. Andrews

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Speed in acquiring the knowledge and skills to perform tasks is crucial. Yet, it still ordinarily takes many years to achieve high proficiency in countless jobs and professions in government, business, industry, and throughout the private sector. There would be great advantages if regimens of training could be established that could accelerate the achievement of high levels of proficiency. This book discusses the constructs of “accelerated learning,” and “accelerated expertise” in particular

2014

Preface

The impetus for this book was a tasking from the Defense Science and Technology Advisory Group (DSTAG), which is the top-level Science and Technology policy-making panel in the Department of Defense.

They were concerned about the complex issues that faced US and Coalition Forces in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Junior officers and enlisted personnel were facing missions and tasks that our military had not had to face since the war in Vietnam, tasks such as counter-insurgency warfare and temporarily governing villages

in the current era of frequent deployments to a variety of locations worldwide to fight the War on Terror, there are far fewer opportunities to have systematic training and practice. These are highly dynamic tasks that require considerable cognitive flexibility.

This volume resulted from two workshops

July 2008; October 2009

A specific problem that motivated these efforts was that military personnel are required to take a hiatus from their primary domain of expertise in order to fulfill other military requirements.

a hiatus can last from a few weeks to as long as four years.

In this volume we tap into the USAF examples, but we address these goals more broadly:

How can we train for resilience and the need to cope with complexity when unexpected events stretch resources and capabilities?

Which military and private sector jobs require high levels of proficiency?

guidance for attempts to accelerate the achievement of proficiency

The world in general, and economies specifically, are becoming more complex, and new learning must be absorbed at ever increasing rates if organizations are to keep up with the changes

1: The Value of Expertise and the Need to “Capture” Knowledge

Overview

The purpose of this book is to provide information for anyone interested in the concept or phenomenon of “accelerating learning”—anyone in education, training, psychology, academia in general, government, military, or industry. We take the concept of skill development to the limit.

3: The Nature of Proficiency

The Cognitive Flexibility Theory of Paul Feltovich, Rand Spiro, and their colleagues (Spiro, Feltovich, Jacobson, & Coulson, 1991, 1992; Spiro & Jheng, 1990) asserts that people (especially experts) have the ability to restructure their knowledge to adapt to complex, ill-structured problems

This ability hinges on experience with diverse problem types, and opportunities to understand the material from differing perspectives

The theory also asserts that knowledge is context-dependent, and so instruction needs to be with reference to meaningful contexts. This entails some straightforward guidelines for effective instruction:

7: Problem and Scenario-Based Training

Problem-Based Learning and Guidance Fading

The educational philosophy of John Dewey (1916) advocated “learning by doing” and emphasized the development of critical thinking skills through problem-solving exercises. Originating primarily in the area of medical education, Problem-Based Learning is an instructional method that has students collaborate in work on challenging practical problems (ill-structured, open-ended, ill-defined). Instructional activities include case-based or analogical reasoning, causal reasoning, story creating, concept mapping to create stories, reasoning about cases, and others

Problem-Based Learning is more effective for later or more advanced learning than initial learning. Indeed, they find that initial learning is facilitated if the trainee studies “worked examples”

13: The Focus of Training: Skills and Abilities

Learners Will Have the Best Opportunity to Become Experts if They Have Expert Mentors

Both Cognitive Flexibility and Cognitive Transformation Theory note the value of mentoring, i.e., active learning plus opportunistic guidance. The good mentor:

Cognitive Flexibility and Cognitive Transformation

In this chapter