Conversation

Aug 12, 2021

1/ Let's talk a little about how people learn in the real world. No, I'm not going to talk about classroom instruction, or pedagogical development, or enrolling in a cohort based course. None of that. Just a simple question: how do people ACTUALLY learn from doing?

Show this thread

And there’s a theory that explains how expertise is constructed in more ill-structured domains — and therefore how to accelerate it. (tl;dr, it’s possible to accelerate case based reasoning). Thread on Cognitive Flexibility Theory below:

Quote Tweet

Feb 9

1/ Let's talk about how note taking can help you accelerate expertise. Yes, I know how that sounds like. No, this isn't hype. There's some solid cognitive science here, and it has FASCINATING things to say about the nature of learning in messy, real world domains.

Show this thread

To sum up, this is my current approach to learning: 1) Is there good pedagogical development in this skill domain? If yes, do DP. DP is still the best. 2) If no, are the feedback loops reasonably short? (e.g. 1-2 days?) If so, try purposeful practice.

2a) If it’s possible to construct a simplified game approach to enable purposeful practice, then go do that. (But this is hard!) cc

@LiaDiBello4

who is an expert at this. 3) Do you have access to an expert? If so, try doing an expertise extraction using cognitive task analysis.

4) Is this an ill-structured domain? If so, switch to searching for context instantiations. (CFT) 5) Finally, if none of the above are true, do trial and error and rely on good reflection best practices (CTT) to gain expertise.

How NATURALISTIC DECISION MAKING Transformed My Approach to Training...

All of this, naturally, is subject to change as I continue to dig into the expertise research + write up notes from practice. Follow if you’d like more updates; I’m not entirely sure what I’ll find next.

Replying to

Where did you learn all this stuff? :o It's so fascinating and really useful. I've never seen someone talk about this concepts apart from you. Any recommendations to continue researching these topics? Learning how to learn is a subset of metacognition, right? That's my jam.

Replying to

Oh, I talked about this in my talk at the Naturalistic Decision Making Association open house. The basic story is that I was searching for a better way to train myself and my people, and I eventually realised that NDM had most of the answers.

youtube.com

How can your team improve decision-making and performance in an increasingly unpredictable world?The field of Naturalistic Decision Making supports organizat...

Replying to

and

There’s a full list of resources in the talk.

Replying to

Is there any chance you know the name of the field that studies action? Action in itself. The field that develops methodologies like precommitment devices, the procrastination equation, accountability devices, etc? Seems tangentially related to NDM :)