Dashe & Thomson's blog in June of this year, The Science of Learning, written by Shane Lueck, serves up some tantalizing tidbits regarding the application to learning of recent discoveries in neuroscience.
This week's cartoon is an expansion on number 5, Feelings Drive Behavior. The thrust in the blog is that emotions influence behavior more than does rational thought (example given: you choose the cake). Therefore, we should acknowledge and attend to the learner's emotional state (e.g., nervousness speaking in front of a group) prior to doling out tasks or information, so that they are prepared to receive them.
Another aspect to the emotion vs. logic, Bones vs. Spock dichotomy that I would add, supported not only by research but by brain structure (e.g., the hypothalamus has neurons devoted to emotion and neurons devoted to logic) is that much of the time our so-called logic is nothing more than justification and rationalization of our desires. Feelings not only trump logic, as Lueck says, the two work in such a yin-yang symbiosis as to be mutually inseparable.
This is part of why unconscious bias is such a tricky business. People will consider their hiring practices fair and color-blind, for instance, but somehow the same faces keep on getting hired year after year. Each hiring decision is easy to support with logic, but the tendency to hire "someone who looks like me" is well documented. In other words, it's an instance of emotion first (aka instinct, gut feeling, hunch, comfort zone,"I have a good feeling about this guy"); logic second.
How does this apply to eLearning design? Well, let's take compliance training. In an office building, you aren't supposed to let someone you don' t know onto your floor, right? But many employees dislike playing cop, and do so anyway.
Most training argues the case for barring strangers using logic alone, and leaves it at that. But imagine if the course was designed to first acknowledge the awkwardness as normal, followed by an exercise to help them overcome that particular emotional block? Would more compliance be the result?
Who knows?--I've never seen it tried. But it would certainly be more common if we followed the science.
Mitch
This week's cartoon is an expansion on number 5, Feelings Drive Behavior. The thrust in the blog is that emotions influence behavior more than does rational thought (example given: you choose the cake). Therefore, we should acknowledge and attend to the learner's emotional state (e.g., nervousness speaking in front of a group) prior to doling out tasks or information, so that they are prepared to receive them.
Another aspect to the emotion vs. logic, Bones vs. Spock dichotomy that I would add, supported not only by research but by brain structure (e.g., the hypothalamus has neurons devoted to emotion and neurons devoted to logic) is that much of the time our so-called logic is nothing more than justification and rationalization of our desires. Feelings not only trump logic, as Lueck says, the two work in such a yin-yang symbiosis as to be mutually inseparable.
This is part of why unconscious bias is such a tricky business. People will consider their hiring practices fair and color-blind, for instance, but somehow the same faces keep on getting hired year after year. Each hiring decision is easy to support with logic, but the tendency to hire "someone who looks like me" is well documented. In other words, it's an instance of emotion first (aka instinct, gut feeling, hunch, comfort zone,"I have a good feeling about this guy"); logic second.
How does this apply to eLearning design? Well, let's take compliance training. In an office building, you aren't supposed to let someone you don' t know onto your floor, right? But many employees dislike playing cop, and do so anyway.
Most training argues the case for barring strangers using logic alone, and leaves it at that. But imagine if the course was designed to first acknowledge the awkwardness as normal, followed by an exercise to help them overcome that particular emotional block? Would more compliance be the result?
Who knows?--I've never seen it tried. But it would certainly be more common if we followed the science.
Mitch
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