A recent meta-analysis1 by Mesmer-Magnus and Viswesvaran examines the value of various pre-instructional interventions for improving learning during training. Several are investigated:
- Attentional advice interventions direct learners to think about the application of training material to their jobs (i.e. “transfer of training”) rather than on basic memorization.
- Meta-cognitive strategies interventions provide learners with specific strategies for internalizing information – for example, identifying where they are having trouble learning a concept and encouraging them to modify their approach to learning it.
- Advance organizers interventions are any text or graphic organizing systems to provide students with a structure for the instruction they are about to receive. This includes outlines and diagrams.
- Goal orientation interventions direct learners toward increasing competence/mastery rather than toward scoring well or passing a test.
- Preparatory information interventions give learners information about the training they are about to receive ahead of time, i.e. priming learners with a cognitive structure into which to integrate future information.
They also split their analyses by the type of outcome that was of interest:
- Cognitive learning includes increases in knowledge of facts, procedures, and other concrete information.
- Skill-based learning includes increases in practicable skills (the integration of knowledge into practicable behaviors).
- Affective learning includes increases in beliefs about knowledge, e.g. the answer to the question “how much did you learn?”
This produced several interesting sets of guidelines for training and educational design.
If your goal is to increase how much students learn about facts, you should use attentional advice, meta-cognitive strategies, and goal orientation interventions.
If your goal is to increase skills, you should use goal orientation, graphic advance organizers, and attentional advice interventions.
If your goal is to make your students feel like they learned something, use goal orientation and attentional advice.
Overall then, goal orientation interventions are consistently effective. Encouraging students to learn for the sake of learning, and not to pass tests, has a positive effect in every way examined. Convincing students not to worry about testing is easier said than done, though.
Perhaps most importantly, none of these interventions hurt. These lists describe the practices that we have the most evidence will give a consistent and large benefit, but all of them have seem to have either a positive or neutral effect on learning. So if you have the time, integration of all five types of interventions will certainly be an effective approach.
- Mesmer-Magnus, J., & Viswesvaran, C. (2010). The role of pre-training interventions in learning: A meta-analysis and integrative review Human Resource Management Review, 20 (4), 261-282 DOI: 10.1016/j.hrmr.2010.05.001 [↩]
Technology advances are making it increasingly easy for organizations to keep close tabs on their employees in terms of both location and behavior. This is viewed by many organizations as a business necessity; they are most often interested in either improving employee performance or minimizing counterproductive behaviors, such as time theft or the wasting of other resources, like gasoline. If you’re going to use such a program, what should you do to minimize negative employee reactions?
A recent study1 by Laurel McNall and Jeff Stanton in the Journal of Business and Psychology examines this question by presenting 208 undergraduates with one of four vignettes putting undergraduates in the job of “textbook sales representative,” which carried with it a up-to-100-mile-per-day driving requirement. The four vignettes were the result of a 2×2 design crossing perceived purpose of monitoring (for “punishment” or to improve “customer service”) with the ability to control whether or not the device is turned on (so that it can be disabled in off-hours). There is no statistical control in that no comparison is made to non-monitoring conditions (which is a shame!).
The results indicate that student sense of privacy invasion did indeed change according to control. If employees can turn off their location monitors, this does seem to improve outcomes. But somewhat surprisingly, the perceived purpose did not influence outcomes – whatever the purpose of the monitoring, students interpreted the same level of invasion of privacy from the vignettes.
There were some shortcomings to this study that make interpretation tricky. As the authors point out, students may not have perceived either monitoring purpose as “unfair,” which would have attenuated any observed relationships. This could have been addressed by including the aforementioned statistical control, or alternatively by measuring perceived unfairness explicitly. The study was also conducted on undergraduates and is correlational in nature – there is no way to be sure that these findings will generalize 1) to employees in real organizations or 2) to actual behavior rather than just beliefs about privacy.
So, with that caveat, we can at least give one recommendation pretty confidently: make sure that your employees have the ability to turn off any devices that monitor them. That does raise at least one new question, however: what should an organization do when an employee turns off their monitor at a time when it should be turned on?
- McNall, L., & Stanton, J. (2010). Private eyes are watching you: Reactions to location sensing technologies. Journal of Business and Psychology DOI: 10.1007/s10869-010-9189-y [↩]
AOM 2010 Conference Coverage
Pre-Conference 1 | Pre-Conference 2 | Planned Schedule
Monday Live-Blog | Post-Conference
I arrived home from Montreal yesterday, so I thought it was time to give some closing notes on this year’s Academy of Management conference.
If you’ve been following my AOM coverage, you know that I planned to live-blog on the academic sessions I attended on Monday and Tuesday. As it turned out, the sessions I was actively participating in, my service schedule, finicky wi-fi, and the physical distance between many sessions (0.87 miles!) made that a little tricky – I only managed to actively report on one session! The distance was an especially troubling problem – if I needed to transfer between the Sheraton and Palais des Congres with only a 10-minute gap between sessions, I knew I would arrive 10 to 30 minutes late to that session, so I decided to just drop them instead.
The three sessions that I was actually a part of went quite well and were well-attended. The first was a PDW (professional development workshop), where Gordon Schmidt and I explained and demonstrated the use of social media in management – as a tool to stay in contact and interact with colleagues, to reach out to students, and to interact with current and future employees. We demonstrated about a dozen technologies over two hours, from blogs to wikis to virtual worlds.
The second was a panel discussion. In addition to Gordon and me were several interesting contributors: (1) Gerald Kain, a professor of information systems at Boston College who studies the use of social media primarily in the healthcare industry, (2) James Lynch, a vice president of communications at American Express who manages all inter-employee communication, and (3) Julia Teahen, the president of Baker College Online, the 15,000-student virtual campus of Baker College. The discussion brought up many interesting ideas about the use of social media from both educational and organizational perspectives, and the discussion led us right up to final buzzer.
The third was a caucus where a smaller group of us discussed the use and future of social media a little more informally.
As the web and technology czar of the OB division of AOM, I was also responsible for managing the technology components of the OB Division Awards Night and Terry Mitchell‘s acceptance talk for the OB Division’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
So how many sessions did I actually get to sit in on as an observer? Three, one of which I blogged on. Two of these sessions discussed the use of virtual worlds technologies, but unfortunately, they were highly theoretical and focused on overall virtual systems, which isn’t very interesting to me. I want to know how individuals respond to these technologies. This is sometimes called “micro-organizational” research, which is also typically the focus of industrial/organizational psychology. There were a few promising bits and pieces in this vein, most notably the work of Tara Behrend, but overall, the Academy was a little light on social media and virtual worlds research this year. I suppose it’s good that my own social media research is getting closer to publication!
Next year’s Academy is in San Antonio, TX. I’m not sure who decided Texas in August was a good idea, and rumor is that the buildings will be as spread out as they were in Montreal. But hopefully next year, I’ll at least get to a few more sessions!