Cognitive Task Analysis helps you unpack the thought processes of experts, so you can teach them to others. Have you ever needed to train novices to perform well on a real-world task or job that’s complex and poorly understood? Some of your experienced people do it well. But you don’t have a ...
Learning & Instruction
In the learning and instruction category, we cover topics such as how people learn, what it takes to build competence and develop new skills, what it means to learn well, and ways that instruction can promote efficient, deep learning.
As with all of our writing, articles in this category are grounded in scientific research.
Read all about learning & instruction here.
Giving Effective Feedback to Foster Understanding
A good classroom teacher looks like a well-oiled student feedback machine. Student responses are analyzed, feedback is given, and the loop repeats. Whether this is done verbally in an all class discussion, or in marginalia scrawled on a stack of quizzes, good teachers know that giving students ...
Do You Learn from Your Mistakes, or Just Try to Avoid Them?
“To err is human, to forgive, divine.” Alexander Pope was right, especially when it comes to learning. Making mistakes while learning is inevitable. Forgive yourself and learn from your mistakes. Research by Nina Keith and others suggests that the way you think about mistakes can either ...
Desirable Difficulties: If at First You Don’t Succeed…You May Have Learned More than You Thought
We’ve all been there, faced with a question or task related to a topic we’ve previously learned, thinking “I know that I know this…why can’t I think of the answer!?” So why is it difficult to remember something we’ve previously learned? Research by Elizabeth Bjork and Robert Bjork, at the ...
What is Competence and Why is it Important?
Competence means that you have the ability to do something well. You are capable of performing a task or job effectively. Competence can include the knowledge and skills needed to solve a quadratic equation. Or, it can comprise the much larger and more diverse clusters of skills, or competencies, ...