But for most people, in most careers, the question of learning is really:
- how do you accelerate the acquisition of expertise
- how do you synthesise new ideas to develop an edge in your career
- forget expertise, do you accelerate basic proficiency in a skill?
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The best place to find answers to these questions turn out to NOT be in the classical education/pedagogy literature.
You want to seek out papers on vocational training instead. Or organisational behaviour (especially if there’s a training component involved).
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The organisation that has invested the most research money into effective accelerated training techniques in messy, real world, applied domains is the military.
I’m not joking.
You want to dig into work funded by military grants. These are likely the most fruitful for careers.
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I’ve written a lot about this topic already. I’ll link out to a few threads before getting back to the meta-point (on finding learning techniques + papers that ACTUALLY work for your career.)
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A thread on a US Department of Defence commissioned report that was eventually published as the book Accelerated Expertise:
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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.
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A thread on Cognitive Flexibility Theory, which comes from the study of accelerating medical expertise:
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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
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A thread on Cognitive Transformation Theory, which explains why some people can become good through trial and error, while others stagnate (spoiler: experts can introspect better on their experiences):
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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?
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Sorry, I got the earlier thread on Accelerated Expertise wrong, see here instead:
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1/ Let's talk about accelerating expertise.
You want to get good. You want to get good fast. How do you do this?
In 2008 and 2009 the US Department of Defence convened two meetings on this very topic.
Here's what they found. (Hint: the answer is NOT deliberate practice).
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Also see ’s article on adapting the US Marine’s Tactical Decision Games to product management training.
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And check out these shadowbox training exercises:
shadowboxtraining.com/news/2022/02/0
shadowboxtraining.com/news/2022/04/2
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What do all of these resources have in common? The answer: they’re drawn from the Naturalistic Decision Making branch of applied psychology.
NDM does a lot of work for the military and healthcare. The researchers overlap quite a bit with human factors and resilience engineering.
Replying to
So my first piece of advice is to look at NDM. The single resource that’s probably the most fruitful to dig into is The Oxford Handbook of Expertise:
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But really the general recommendation to look at training systems or training research that’s been funded by the military is probably a good heuristic.
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For instance: the DARPA digital tutor. Millions of dollars. Result: 16 weeks of technical training -> students outperformed practitioners with years of experience in the field.
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But of course military funded research doesn’t just result in better training methods in the military.
Sometimes it funds results in sports science. Like Peter Fadde’s work on accelerating pitch recognition in baseball (later applied to tennis): peterfadde.com/projectspitchb
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Quick summary:
- You show tennis players video of a serve.
- You black out the serve right before it connects.
- You ask the player to identify the serve
- Repeat 100s of times.
- The tennis player gains expert level serve recognition quickly.
- They can do this on iPhone.
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Anyway, my main point:
- Want to learn how to learn in your career? Don’t pay as much attention to classroom based education research.
- Unless it’s been applied in vocational training settings
- Focus mostly on research that’s been done in applied domains
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- The military has funded a huge amount of work into better training methods.
- And they tend to not care as much about performance on tests. (They really care about transfer to real world performance)
- So that’s one fruitful area to dig for ideas.
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But perhaps my biggest point:
When you next read a meta-analysis or paper, ASK:
“What context is this technique intended for? What context was this research performed in?”
Many articles and threads on ‘learning to learn’ tend to draw on classroom-based research.
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There’s nothing bad or wrong about classroom-based education research.
But you should be very careful when applying it to vocational skills training.
Whereas there may be more useful, easier to apply ideas elsewhere.
Ok that’s all I have to say for now. The end.
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Minor correction: I searched for funding sources for Fadde’s pitch recognition research and I don’t think the military directly funded it. I regret the error.
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But of course military funded research doesn’t just result in better training methods in the military.
Sometimes it funds results in sports science. Like Peter Fadde’s work on accelerating pitch recognition in baseball (later applied to tennis): peterfadde.com/projectspitchb
Show this thread
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