I was driving this morning and heard a very interesting piece on NPR.
You’ve probably heard throughout your life that if someone is doodling on paper during a meeting or a training class, they’re probably bored and completely disengaged. However, new research pretty much debunks that and when you look at the logic behind it, it does make a lot of sense.
Basically, the brain is a machine that’s geared to process information, and since human perception has multiple inputs there’s a lot of information for it to pull from. When the brain doesn’t have enough to keep it busy, it starts looking for other things to do. Generally it has a couple of choices. One is to daydream, which equals total disengagement. The other is something like doodling, which means that it’s in creation mode. When you’re doodling, you’re still using the information that’s coming in, even if you feel like you’re disengaged.
A researcher took this information and created a study where participants had to listen to a long, boring phone message. The researcher then asked people afterwards to see how many pieces of information they could recall. When she broke it down by people who doodled and people who didn’t, the people who doodled were able to remember significantly more.
If you’re interested, go read the article and listen to the webcast. There’s some really interesting information in there about who doodles and how the British press mistook Bill Gates’ doodles for Tony Blair’s and had some really unkind things to say about him.
Bored? Try Doodling to Keep the Brain on Task.
Posted in Uncategorized
I know it’s been a long time since I put a post up here, but I saw this in a journal this morning and it made me really happy to see it.
In about the middle of 2008, some of the top researchers in the training field published a meta-analysis in the
APA’s and I/O psychology’s top journal (
Journal of Applied Psychology) about trainee reactions. Basically, a
meta-analysis is when researchers take all of the published and unpublished research they can find and pull it together in one big report. Essentially, they’re using some high-level statistics to use all of the participants in all of the studies into one large meta-study. By the time they were done, they had looked at 136 studies which encompassed 27,020 trainees. They looked at a lot of different variables and relationships to see what all affects trainee reactions.
The top predictor of trainee reactions?
Instructor Style, which accounted for about 37% of the variance in trainee reactions, which is over and above the effects of trainee characteristics and organizational support. That’s not to say that organizational support and trainee characteristics aren’t important, but the instructor who conducts the class can be a huge factor in whether or not the reactions that trainees have to a program is positive or negative. And, that reaction can be a big part of whether or not trainees are willing to transfer new knowledge to the workplace.
So, the upshot of this is that if you want to make sure that your training dollars are well-spent, you need to make darned sure that the instructors you use are top notch facilitators. They can’t fix a bad training program, but if you’ve done all of the right stuff to create a good program, instructors with style can be the deciding factor in the color of your training ROI ink being red or black.
Posted in evidence-based business, i-o psychology, research, training
