Training Industry Magazine - Summer 2016 - (Page 33)

MEMORY THE CRITICAL BOTTLENECK TO LEARNING BY BRIAN S. MCGOWAN, PH.D. I f the ultimate goal of training and educational interventions is to increase what learners know so they can make more informed decisions and perform better, then it stands to reason that the ultimate value of any training intervention is dependent on the effective storage (and retrieval) of new information within the learners' memories. This might be one of those blindingflashes-of-the-obvious moments: Training and learning are fundamentally dependent on human memory systems. Importantly, understanding the implications of human memory systems on training and learning is not simply a theoretical pursuit. In the past few years, more and more has been published and presented about the connections among adult learning theory, cognitive science and neurophysiology - or what some have simply coined "brainbased learning" or the "science of learning." While it may appear to some that the complexity of this evidence is overwhelming, there are examples of lower-hanging fruit that trainers can immediately leverage to evolve and improve their training programs. The simplest, most practical and perhaps most valuable way of understanding and leveraging the science of learning is to acknowledge the critical bottleneck created by our memory system, or systems, as it were, and then ground one's planning and design intelligently. MEMORY SYSTEMS The sub-system model of memory was first proposed in the 1960s as a framework for understanding how and when learning can be accelerated and training can be enhanced. As described by Atkinson and Shiffrin, information is received through the sensory memory system. This first subsystem can process a huge amount of information but can retain it only for a short period of time (milliseconds). As the information in sensory memory is instinctively filtered, the information that is deemed to have some relevance or value is raised to awareness and enters the second sub-system: working memory. Working memory (re-)organizes the information so that it may be efficiently stored as discrete neural maps within the third sub-system: long-term memory. Absent of disease, long-term memory has a theoretically limitless capacity in terms of storage duration and volume, but storage and retrieval are not same thing. T R A I N I N G I N DUSTR Y MA GAZ INE - SUMMER201 6 I WWW.TRAI NINGINDU S T RY . C OM/ MAGAZ I NE 33 http://www.trainingindustry.com/ezine.aspx

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Training Industry Magazine - Summer 2016

Perspectives
Table of Contents
Three Strategies to Ensure Your Training Has Tensile Strength
Experience, Exposure and Education
Beyond the Classroom Paradigm
Applying the Buddy System
Purpose-Driven Professional & Organization Success
Making It Personal: The Four Pillars of High-Impact Mentoring
Blowing Your Millennial Mindset
Hidden Forces: Unconscious Bias in Learning
Memory: The Critical Bottleneck to Learning
Gender Barriers & Solutions to Leadership
Cognititive Collaboration: Utilizing Diverse Thinking & Behavioral Preferences
Get Into the Act: Accelerating Collaborative Teamwork
Dispelling the Five Myths of Microlearning
Quicken Loans: Culture Driven
Developing Global Leaders: On-the-Job Leadership Development
From Where I Sit
Why Do We Wait to Train Our Managers?
Is Knowledge Overrated?
Is Your Business Acument Showing?
Avnet Expands Services with ExitCertified Acquisition
Company News
What's Online
Training Talk

Training Industry Magazine - Summer 2016