Transfer learning into real-world performance

- As designers of learning experiences, our goal is to help learners transfer what they've learned to real world performance. That's not likely there'll be answering multiple choice questions about auto repair leadership or survival medicine when they're in the field, they'll actually be performing tasks. It would be helpful, wouldn't it, if a multiple choice question dropped out of the sky every time we needed to make a consequential decision. But that doesn't happen because they look at isolated points of knowledge. They frequently provide little of the performance context that's so critical. By identifying possible options, multiple choice questions actually help too much. And they make the exercise more academic than authentic, for their multiple choice questions limit the number of options we need to consider 'cause it's only those listed. Choosing from amongst set of options is entirely different, from thinking of alternatives on your own, which is what successful behavior often requires. The success of our learners means they're doing the right thing at the right time. Real life actions aren't usually choosing a letter. How often has anyone asks you an ABCD question? You're much more likely to be asked questions such as, "So what are you going to do about it? How will you reduce costs? How will you make dinner? How can you double sales?" So how do we make the activity component of CCAF authentic? Authentic context and challenges demand authentic responses. So to differentiate them from just giving an answer and also to reaffirm from our preference for active learning, in CCAF the A stands for Activity. We want our learners to do something. We can simulate a situation for the behavior we want the learner to perform. And it's often not that hard to simulate a medical procedure, a conversation, a business model, preparing a legal brief or any behaviors from crying knowledge judgment noction. In this situation, you might present to the learner a list, but it needs to be a very large list of options. We call the post law enforcement response to terrorism. It was important to that simulation to have so many options listed that the design didn't fall into the typical weaknesses of multiple choice questions. Each of the prime options listed such as, move, report to dispatch, put on a gas mask, expands with more options. And because the response is under time pressure, learners don't have time to read all the options and compare. They must know what to do immediately and take those actions quickly. There are many additional ways to make actions authentic, use of entry text fields, moving objects into a quick sequence, clustering objects that are related in some way, stopping a playing video when a performance area is detected or moving a student-teacher to a better vantage point to observe all children in the classroom. We've used all these techniques and many more. In fact, we use such techniques in pretty much every learning program we create. Serious learning doesn't consider retention of facts, a valid measure of performance readiness. Doing the right thing at the right time, means learners must be asked to make realistic decisions and execute procedures as may actually be required.