Improvements in Learning

Background

An element of Deliberate Practice, improvement, is described in this article.

Improvement

In the context of learning, two kinds of improvement are relevant.

  1. Performance improvement: an improvement in performance is when a learner can get better results, fewer drawbacks, or more intrinsic rewards.

  2. Knowledge improvement: This means that long-term memory has been strengthened as measured by accuracy, completeness, organization, recall, and so on.

Improvement is a synonym for growth.

Examples of Improvement

  1. Being better at driving a car as measured by being more relaxed, safer, better able to handle snow driving, and more able to corner at high speeds.

  2. Becoming better at selling as measured by more sales for each unit of time, better relationships with customers, and having more fun.

  3. Becoming better at physics as measured by better understanding, more fun, and improved abilities to apply physics to solve problems.

  4. Becoming better at history as measured by better recall, improved abilities to apply history to present-day decision-making, better skills in identifying expert historians, having more fun, and so on.

Summary: Improvement is the process of becoming better at something that is worthwhile. In Deliberate Practice, this is typically done in ways that provide the learner with payback, as in 5x or 10x.

Rationale for Improvement

  1. Feels great. Motivating. Gives confidence of future improvements. Provides optimism as in “I can excel at this.”

  2. Provides payback. Improvement leads to more rewards, both internal and external. This makes learning cost-effective to do.

  3. The methods used for improving learning can be directly used to improve products, processes, cultures, organizations, and similar. Thus, if you learn how improvement works, then you can apply this to many things.

  4. A natural outcome of the improvement process is to improve learning itself. This means that if you are improving your knowledge and performance in tennis, you will also improve how you learn in general.

  5. Greatly enhances collaboration, team spirit, and results in organizations. It is like a happy drug for team members.

Here are some concerns

  1. Improvement is hard for most people to grasp. It is common to mix it up with judging things on a continuum that spans from bad to good. Judgement shuts down improvement.

  2. Improvement often provokes strong negative affect because everyone is used to being judged, and most of us do not like this because it is usually negative.

  3. People unskilled in improvement need lots of coaching and support in learning how to improve. For example, in faculty workshops, we used to devote four full days. Two of these days were needed to get professors to grasp the meaning of improvement, and two were needed for skill development.

How to Improve Learning

Engage in Reflective Thinking (RT) on a regular basis. Here is how to apply RT to improve learning.