Fact or Fiction: Learning Styles Lead to Better Learning

Have you ever been pushed into group work even though it wasn’t necessary for the task? Or build a 3-D model of your department’s workflow? Such activities may trigger a learner’s perceived learning preferences—auditory, visual, verbal, interpersonal, kinesthetic (tactile/physical)–but don’t result in better recall of the learning information. Educators and education institutions have long believed that learning styles not only matter but are the key to effective learning. Many educators have been encouraged to create learning experiences based on these “styles” to improve learning outcomes. But, do such experiences actually result in better learning? And, do these learning styles help instructors understand how learning actually happens?

An individual’s learning style can be determined by a learning inventory questionnaire, typically VARK or Index of Learning Styles. Instructors use the insights from these questionnaires to tailor their instruction to meet the perceived learning styles of their audience. While this knowledge is interesting, a learner’s perceived learning style should not be the sole determining factor for instructional methodology or keep educators from teaching in a manner best suited to their content. Learning styles should be viewed as learner preferences, not stand-alone requirements for learning.

Many learners believe they can only learn via a specific style. For example, after taking the questionnaire, a learner is told she is an auditory learner and should listen to lectures in order to learn the information well. Another learner believes he is a visual learner and says, “I can only learn if there are videos.” A test went well for another learner because he used hand-made flashcards, so he believes he is a verbal learner. Yet another learner reviewed for an exam by building models of molecules out of pipe cleaners and cotton balls, so he believes he is a kinesthetic learner. However, years of research calls these claims into question. In a study published in 2017 researchers found that there is actually no association with performance and a learner’s believed learning style, or rather preference. In fact, this persistent belief in learning styles is due to a type of cognitive bias known as confirmation bias: a learner believes something to be true, and when the belief is confirmed by observation, she neglects contrary evidence.

Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork published work in 2009 that concluded, “there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice” (2009).

However, learning styles shouldn’t be disregarded entirely. Instead, they should be tied to the content rather than the learner. In other words, a play should not be just read, but performed. Art is to be seen and experienced. Anatomy and physics should be practiced in a laboratory. The incorporation of different learning styles when aligned with the content likely will increase engagement from the learner. Additionally, educators must understand what is going on in the brains of their learners in order to make their instruction more effective.

The brain does not work in isolation: visual cues aren’t interpreted separate from auditory cues. Signals from all senses are transmitted simultaneously into neural pathways where memories are formed. Learning occurs when these memories are retrieved. Memories are made after associations (emotional, physical, etc.) have been formed and the act of retrieval has been practiced. Forgetting (when the brain is unsuccessful in retrieving the information it is looking for) may seem like a bad thing, but is a powerful force that encourages deeper memory formation.

So what should educators do? Create learning experiences based on the content and utilize proven methodologies that foster long-term learning: metacognition, retrieval, feedback, direct instruction, and application. The delivery of content should consider how to maximize learner engagement, which leads to increased curiosity and in turn, memory formation, while remaining focused on the objective. Know your audience, but also know the science of cognition. Deliver instruction that cues the neural pathways that create long-term connections within the brain, sparking memory-formation and a thirst for more.

Forgetting Is Good for You

Matthew Jensen Hays, Ph.D.
Senior Director of Research and Analytics

We all complain about how lousy our memories are. But forgetting is one of the most important tasks your brain undertakes. In fact, your brain intentionally and immediately discards almost everything you experience. Sounds persist for a few seconds before they are irretrievably lost. Images are trashed after at most a half-second. Try it yourself: Close your eyes and count the letters in this sentence.

Even when something survives all of these filters, it usually vanishes soon after. How many times have you been introduced to someone only to have no idea what their name is after a minute or two?

What’s going on here? Why is your brain so intent on throwing away everything you work to learn?

A popular myth is that you’ve got limited space and your brain is aggressively trying to make room for new information. In reality, anything you’ve stored lasts nearly forever. You just lose access to it—which is why you have an “ohhh yeah” moment when you find your keys. Of course that’s where you put them. The information was in there. You just couldn’t access it.

It turns out that forgetting—in the form of this loss of access—is an adaptation. Consider the horror of perfect memory: You’d remember with perfect clarity every time you made a mistake, and every time someone was rude to you, and every time you hurt someone’s feelings. You’d call to mind every phone number—yours and others’—equally well. You’d vividly recall every time you bit your tongue, and every time you inhaled. You’d go insane.

So how do we remember anything?

Researchers in the psychological sciences have catalogued dozens of triggers that cause your brain to hold onto information. An example is when you encounter something repeatedly, especially if those encounters are spread out in time. Your brain expects it to come up again in the future, and so information about it is preserved. This “spacing effect” works on such a fundamental neurological level that it is even found in the not-quite-brains of sea slugs!

Another trigger is the retrieval of information from in your brain. People who prepare for a test by calling the material up from memory get good at bringing it up from memory. People who prepare for a test by re-reading the material get good at reading the test questions, but not knowing the answers.

These triggers operate on mechanisms beyond your conscious control. We’ve all thought “Jeez I really need to remember this” only to have it suffer the same fate as almost everything else. You may think something is important, but your brain doesn’t care what you think.

Instead, you need to use the triggers to get your brain to agree with you that something is important. For remembering someone’s name, you can test yourself under your breath. For more complex materials, you may want to rely on software that incorporates research on these cognitive triggers.

And the next time you blank on a movie star’s name—but still recall the entire theme song to a cartoon you haven’t seen since you were six-going-on-seven—remember that these are side effects of your brain generally taking pretty good care of you.

67% Improvement in call center performance

Call Center Challenges

Two of the biggest challenges organizations face are employee turnover and the subsequent poor performance of new employees. High turnover not only impacts the bottom line, it affects customer satisfaction and team morale.

Making matters worse, hiring and onboarding new employees is surprisingly costly. According to Bersin at Deloitte, turnover costs range from tens of thousands of dollars to 2x salary. Those astonishing figures include sourcing, interviewing, reviewing, reference checking, hiring, training, and unproductive time (4 weeks to 6 months).

Onboarding Training

The solutions are clear: First, reduce turnover by implementing practices that lead to employee retention. Second, institute training methods that onboard new hires as quickly as possible. And third, use principles from the brain sciences to make training stick in the minds of new hires so they rapidly become productive and satisfied in their work.

This study looks at Amplifire’s impact on training, turnover, and financial outcomes when it was deployed at scale in large organizations.

90.8% Less Training Time for New Hires

Amplifire’s adaptive algorithms personalize training so learners focus only on content they don’t know or are uncertain about. This saves time and money. In this case, Amplifire reduced training time from 240 minutes to 22 minutes. The total time to deliver Amplifire training to the 209 agents at this call center was 76.6 hours. Amplifire saved 683 training hours.

Employee Proficiency 5 Months Faster

Productivity is important to any organization’s success, and new hire productivity depends on effective training. For this technical services and installation firm, the number of jobs completed each day is one of the most critical profitability components. Margins are razor thin. Amplifire improved the jobs-per-day completion rate by 25%. Amplifire-trained technicians started out with 2.5 jobs per day, whereas non-Amped technicians took 5 months to reach this level of proficiency.

Learning That’s Gamified

All games use powerful triggers that cause learning, long term memory, and motivation. This is true of board games, video games (which now generate more revenue than movies), and sports. You can think of triggers as being out here in the real world in the form of things like people, nature, books, videos, and techniques in software. Certain triggers cause specific brain circuits to switch on, causing learning and long term memory so we can then remember what we’ve learned at a future point in time. Triggers are the cause, and learning is the effect. Some of the most effective triggers work through emotion and attention—two hallmarks of games.

These are the six gaming triggers built into the Amplifire algorithm:

Uncertainty propels game players forward because they don’t know exactly what is coming next. Uncertainty triggers curiosity, a mental state seen at right in a set of fascinating experimental results. Attention producing levels of dopamine skyrocket whenever a reward has a 50% likelihood of occurring (top curve). As Robert Sapolsky notes, “You have introduced the word maybe into the equation and that is reinforcing like nothing else on earth.” Dopamine and attention levels fall from this peak when the reward becomes predictable.

In Amplifire, the perceived reward is closing an information gap. First, you make a bet on your knowledge with the proposition that asks, “How sure are you?” That question stimulates uncertain expectations of reward—will you close the information gap? Maybe. Second, as you progress, Amplifire withdraws material that has been mastered. What’s left is increasingly harder material. This maintains high uncertainty and focused attention as you move through a module.

Feedback can boost learning by 500% when compared to non-feedback learning. In Amplifire, learners receive explanations about both correct and incorrect answers. This detailed elaboration strengthens both information storage and retrieval processes in the brain. Second, the review page shows learners precisely how they progressed through a module, from typically high levels of misinformation and doubt, to mastery of the material.

Confidence triggers a massive number of switches that affect learning. Making judgments of learning means storage and retrieval processes are activated. Asking “are you sure” results in metacognition (thinking about thinking) and causes both top-down attention and bottom-up salience. Confidence also spurs attention because it is correlated with social status—one of the most sought after personal qualities in the human experience.

Progress motivates future activity through the buoyant feeling that comes from reaching your goals. Amplifire adapts to each learner’s level of mastery so that the material is appropriately difficult, but not so hard that motivation suffers. This ensures a learning experience in a gratifying emotional state that the learner is likely to want to repeat, and repetition is a key cognitive trigger for durable memory.

Misinformation is a unique feature of Amplifire that makes clear the possibility that confidently held, but wrong information may lead to error, injury, or embarrassment sometime in the future. That emotionally alarming possibility, when revealed in Amplifire, focuses your attention on the learning so you can avoid that outcome.

A Note on Leaderboards: They are motivating in games, but create a dangerous, dispiriting risk in an educational setting because people can feel their core intelligence being judged and ranked. We believe that all people can learn enormous amounts of useful information. For some, it merely takes more time.

Study Less. Learn More.

If you’ve ever used flash cards to study for a test, you’ve probably run through a deck several times in a row. The second round felt easier than the first—a clear signal that you were learning and spending your study time wisely, right?

Actually, you were experiencing the fluency illusion. An immediate, second study session feels powerful (because the material is so familiar), but it provides almost zero benefit. Your subjective experience during learning is often unrelated to the quality of that learning.

In fact, many conditions of learning that feel difficult are far superior to the alternatives. Robert Bjork at UCLA calls these conditions “desirable difficulties.” Study protocols that feel more difficult are often much better at engaging the mental processes that support learning. Of course, the desirable part is not the extra hurdles during studying; it’s the higher test score at the end.

Unfortunately, most students haven’t read Dr. Bjork’s work. They use intuition to guide their study habits. But because what’s good for your brain is often counterintuitive, students usually wind up spending their study time poorly. For example, it’s better to let some time pass—hours or even days—before you run through a deck of flash cards again. The second round will be harder, but your score on a later test will be higher (a phenomenon called the spacing effect).

At Amplifire, we’ve assembled a Science Advisory Board that includes Dr. Bjork and other esteemed professors and researchers. We’ve based our software on thousands of pages of their research, plus work from other labs. The result: Amplifire makes a big impact on test scores and grades.

One of our clients helps law students become lawyers by preparing them for the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE). These learners spend hundreds of hours preparing, and must continually make decisions about how to spend that time. Then they take the test and get the score they have to live with.

We analyzed data from their practice exams to determine whether they would have scored better if they had used more Amplifire.

This type of analysis can be a bit tricky. Comparing two groups of learners (a between-subjects design) would either be unethical or invalid. Obviously, we couldn’t withhold Amplifire from some learners and require it of others. On the other hand, if we let learners choose whether to use Amplifire, any differences we found might have been due to study habits or motivation or anything else that varies from person to person.

We had to compare learners to themselves. But this can be tricky, too. We couldn’t have each student take the MBE twice—once with Amplifire and once without.

Instead, we looked closely at each individual’s behavior in our software.

Getting ready for the MBE requires studying dozens of topics. Learners can choose to do more or less work in Amplifire on each of those topics.

Our hypothesis: The more Amplifire you do, the better you’ll score. For example, if a learner completed 20% of Amplifire on Topic A, but 80% of Amplifire on Topic B, we expected them to score relatively higher on Topic B than on Topic A. This within-subjects design controls for the effects of aptitude, motivation, sleep quality on the day of the exam, and everything else that varies between learners. Any observed differences must therefore be due to Amplifire.

We analyzed data from 3,352 learners preparing for the MBE and presented the findings at the 58th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. The data supported our hypothesis. The more Amplifire the learners did—independent of everything else they could have done—the better they scored.

Doing all available Amplifire work increased the proportion correct on a simulated MBE by 3.6%. That may not sound like much, but keep in mind that these learners log hundreds of hours of other work on those same topics. The fact that Amplifire nevertheless made a difference is a testament to the ability of the software to adapt to what learners need according to the principles of learning and memory. Also, the MBE is a pass-fail exam. For many people, a single correct response is the difference between becoming a lawyer and becoming a lawyer’s assistant.

The cognitive phenomena that Amplifire harnesses are robust and have been demonstrated in many different contexts. The spacing effect, for example, is such a fundamental property of how brains work that it can be found in the rudimentary nervous systems of sea slugs.

Yet as we enter 2018, many educational settings still feature conditions of learning that merely feel better, but are actually far from optimal—and can even be counterproductive. Learning researchers have lamented for decades how infrequently their findings make their way into the classroom and other educational settings.

The benefits of Amplifire provide yet another validation of these scientists’ efforts, and give them reason to celebrate. Through our software, their findings are now reaching millions of learners.

If you’d like your students to start benefiting from hundreds of counterintuitive discoveries about how people learn, reach out here.

How to Get Real Insight From Your LMS

Chief Learning Officers spend copious amounts of time and money on learning management systems – as they should, but there’s one big problem: they can’t measure the precise impact the LMS has on not only training goals but overarching business objectives.

Most learning management systems lack the depth of data insights necessary to measure the ROI of your training programs. If your learning management system lacks the following analytic capabilities, you may need to integrate it with a knowledge engineering platform.

Three Essential Employee Insights to Pull From Your LMS

1. Confidently Held Misinformation (CHM) – This is the most important metric you’ve never heard of (unless you’re a huge nerd and read all of our content). What is it? It’s the precursor to error. The sooner you detect it, the less organizational risk you face. We’ve found that professionals across industries possess varying degrees of CHM. The variation (even among employees who report to the same boss) is astounding. CHM data goes beyond traditional reporting and prioritizes struggle areas based on learner-assessed confidence. Imagine the long-term benefits of focusing on high-risk topics and high-risk employees before lower-risk areas. Imagine the immediate reduction in error and injury.

2. Struggle Heatmaps – Your LMS (and/or its integrated, data-rich learning platform) should provide insight into four particular types of risk: Misinformation, Regression, Understanding, and Systemic. The risk posed by a lack of understanding can be visualized in the form of a struggle heatmap. Your reporting functionality should highlight employees who struggle to master a question or topic after several attempts, even after viewing the correct answer. Actionable analytics like this can be sent directly to managers who can help high-risk employees reach their potential.

3. Misinformation to Mastery – Reporting that compares starting knowledge to ending knowledge should not only provide a visual representation of success but should quantify the monetary ROI of your training program. For example, if you know the average annual cost of a specific problem you’re trying to solve as well as the number of incidents per year directly caused by misinformation, you’ll have an accurate estimate of the financial impact of relevant training content. Employees who can confidently deploy knowledge under pressure are vital to financial success.

These three data insights are just the beginning. Learn how you can integrate your LMS with a data-rich learning platform by contacting us.

One Simple Way Your Organization Can Change the World

Not all learning is intelligent learning. Some learning goes in one ear and out the other. Some learning is tortuously tedious. Intelligent learning is targeted, engaging, memorable, and based in neurobiology. Intelligent learning creates knowledge that can change the world.

The Importance of Knowledge

Knowledge constructs roads and buildings, grows food, fashions clothes and furniture, cures ailing bodies, and designs smart phones and satellites. Virtually every component in the economy – whether it’s trifling or crucial – relies on knowledge and our ability to apply it. Not only does knowledge lead to prosperity, but according to Thomas Jefferson, “…knowledge is power, knowledge is safety, and knowledge is happiness.”

Perhaps this is why the topic of learning is moving to the center stage of public discourse. We instinctively know that it’s the basis of a future society that works for the benefit of our descendants. We should get it right. So far, we haven’t.

This worry is demonstrably critical, for knowledge has brought us this far through the ages. However, the physical, social, and geopolitical circumstances of the 21st century carry unique and daunting problems that humanity has never before faced. It falls upon knowledge to once again give us the ability to adapt to our ever-changing circumstances. Individuals with knowledge stored and integrated within their marvelous brains make adaptation and prosperity possible.

How to Change the World

The Amplifire platform provides organizations with a science-based tool designed for intelligent learning. When all of your employees have access to intelligent and efficient learning tools, your organization can prosper, and eventually, change the world.

Shaking Up Corporate Training – How to Create an Engaging Learning Culture

Some training topics are just boring, and there’s nothing you can do to build intrigue. Right?

Wrong, actually. Even regulatory training can be fun if you develop an engaging learning culture. Imagine the knowledge your employees would gain if they spent more time learning and less time memorizing answers. Successful organizations understand that in order to maximize corporate performance, they must first maximize employee knowledge.

A Stagnant Training Culture Breeds Conformity

Your company may hold a number of corporate training sessions, but that doesn’t mean you have an engaging learning culture. Mandatory training that isn’t focused on employee potential breeds conformity and stagnation

“Most employees dread training. It means time away from their day-to-day jobs in a brightly lit conference room to learn something the way the company wants them to learn it, to meet a specific business need.” -Paul Petrone, Editor, LinkedIn Learning

Organizations with a stagnate training program . . .

• Experience high employee turnover
• Struggle to retain customers
• Lose their competitive edge

An Engaging Learning Culture Empowers Employees

A learning culture encourages and helps employees reach their goals. When employees feel supported, they feel valued. Organizations that transform training into learning see an increase in employee engagement which results in an increase in performance for both the employee and the business. An engaging learning culture motivates employees and spurs creativity, which leads to innovation and streamlined processes.

Benefits of Adopting an Engaging Learning Culture

• Increase in employee engagement and productivity – Satisfied employees take fewer sick days and are more productive.
• Decrease in employee attrition – Employees are happier when they feel valued and know their company is invested in their success.
• Increase in customer satisfaction – There is a direct correlation between employee and customer satisfaction.
• Collaboration and synergy – Projects run smoothly when employees collaborate and share knowledge.
• Attracting top talent – Job seekers look for companies that are innovative and support career growth.
• Ease in succession – Increasing employee knowledge makes it easier to retain top talent and promote from within.

How to Create an Engaging Learning Culture

If learning is not recognized or rewarded in your organization, you have some challenges to overcome before you can shake up your corporate training program. Below are three steps to help you get going.

1. Get Stakeholder Buy-in

Corporate culture comes from the top-down. To change your culture, you need the C-suite’s buy-in.  This can be challenging because they often don’t fully understand what a culture of learning is nor the benefits it brings the organization. Most likely, they think it just entails more training. You’ll need to clearly convey the benefits of developing a culture of learning.

2. Prove Training ROI

You’ll get buy-in if you can prove the ROI of “shaken up” training. In most cases, measuring ROI is difficult because there isn’t a direct correlation between training and outcomes. Sure, you can measure whether employees passed or failed the training, but passing doesn’t mean they mastered the content. (Mastery leads to a change in behavior, which results in a change in outcomes.)

Perhaps, you want to improve customer satisfaction or the number of employee safety incidents. You can measure the effectiveness of learning, by aligning learning objectives with these business goals and tracking the KPIs.

3. Find the Right Learning Platform

Stop relying on passive PowerPoint slides and videos to train your employees. When training is boring, the material is quickly forgotten. Take an active learning approach that engages employees. Active learning improves the learning experience and increases knowledge retention.

No More Boring Topics

Of course, every company must train their employees on “boring topics” – compliance, technology, etc., – but it doesn’t have to be a grueling experience. If you develop an engaging learning culture, your employees will thank you!

Let us know if we can help you, contact us.

The Secret to Better Corporate Learning: Personalized Training

“It’s not good enough for them just to know the answer. They need to be extremely confident in their knowledge.” – Marney Andes, senior director of talent management at Air Methods, a helicopter company providing medical transport

Any talent management professional will tout the importance of better corporate learning, but the aviation industry is especially on board. The relationship between employee confidence and customer satisfaction is never clearer than in matters of life and death.

What does this mean for your organization? Well, the need for better corporate learning across all industries is evident – your financial success and customer satisfaction depend on it.

The Talent Management Idealist

As a talent management professional, you want your employees to continually learn and stay ahead of the competition, but your corporate learning budget is getting out of control, and employees are complaining about “wasting time with training.”

You understand their justified complaints about perfunctory training. The idealist in you knows there’s something better.

The Alternative to Traditional Training: Personalized Training

If you’re an idealist, your hope is not misplaced. There is something better, and it’s called Personalized Training.

Machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, has recently been applied to corporate e-learning technology with great success. Using predictive algorithms, the software is able to adapt to each employee’s knowledge level, and focus on areas of struggle.

Of the companies that have adopted a personalized training approach to employee development, few have looked back.

How Companies are Using Personalized Training

• Being more selective in hiring
• Shortening the duration – and cost – of onboarding programs
• Improving employee retention
• Saving money in learning and development
• Reducing the number of instructor-led training sessions
• Increasing employee engagement
• Minimizing error
• Increasing efficiency

The list goes on-and-on.

Does Your Organization’s Learning Software Care About Learners?

As you probably know, Tesla gave away all its patents in 2014. Although it may sound like a terrible business decision, Tesla feels it is critical to help electric cars gain traction (forgive me). Sharing best practices is a good way to do that.

At Amplifire, we have quite a few patents, but our e-learning software is also built on thousands of pages of published research. For example, when someone gets a question wrong in our learning platform, we wait a bit to show them the correct answer—and how long we wait varies. We’ve been doing that for years, based on fundamental properties of how people learn.

I just came across this article from 2014, which confirms the importance of variation when it comes to the length of delay before feedback. Yet there are many e-learning software companies that don’t even delay feedback—much less vary the delay to optimize learning.

e-Learning Software Companies Have Great Power . . . And Great Responsibility

This might not seem like a big deal, but it is. You have a responsibility to help your learners, and we have a responsibility to build software that helps your organization accomplish this. The students who use our e-learning software don’t choose it; their professor chooses the book to which we’re linked. The employees who use our software don’t choose it; their management selects it as part of their training solution. The doctors and nurses who use our software don’t choose it; their hospital system executives sign them up.

It’s our responsibility to prepare students for next semester’s classes, where they’ll need to remember everything they previously learned. It’s our responsibility to equip employees with the knowledge they need to succeed. It’s our responsibility to help healthcare providers prevent patient harm.

For someone like me, who’s spent quite a while on the academic side of cognitive science, it’s frustrating to see other e-learning software companies shirk this responsibility. Yeah, it’s easier to build software that just provides the feedback right away. It’s also easier to mass together all the material on one topic. It’s easier to not read all those journal articles than to read them.

But they’re right there! For decades, researchers have been doing for e-learning what Tesla just did for every other electric car maker and battery technology company.

I’m proud to say we’ve taken the time to read the research and construct our e-learning system to harness fundamental properties of cognitive science. After all, we owe it to our learners.

Learn more about Amplifire, the e-learning company that cares about learners.