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May
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2007
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17,000,000 College Students Can’t All Be Wrong
By Jay B. Bowden For the last few months, I seem to have been bombarded by clients who want to virtually inundate every course… with every fact, figure, point, policy, procedure possible! Oh don’t worry; I tell them that their learners won’t retain it all and that they are actually subtracting from the knowledge they want them to retain – but it doesn’t matter. They want to pour the information in anyway. Although this is very common in training today, what research tells us is that your learners can only process so much information at a time. If you pour out a ‘Niagara Falls’ of facts and minute details, many of them never will be adequately soaked up. Like water overflowing the capacity of a bucket, that information will just wash away! Here are a few of the many reasons I’ve been given over the years:
“It’s important!” Everything is important to somebody. That’s not the point; throwing it into a course doesn’t make it important to the learner. In fact, learners get pretty good at determining what is important and what they can forget. “I need to make sure it’s in there.” In other words, you need to CYA so you can say, “Yep, I taught ‘em.”
Courses are not opportunities to cram information. Just ask the sixteen and a half million college students who are taking final exams. Personally, I was never able to cram sixteen weeks worth of material into one study session. Were you? |
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