Is this why you make rubbish decisions?

[Horse]

Single track, innit.

No, Silverstone, all over the place, loads of others ...

[Horse]

steering applies to two-track vehicles as well as single track. Scandinavian flick aside, counter steering would be counterproductive in a car.

Tell Russ Swift that

1.50 - 2.00 ish, you can see the car react to counter-steering.

Now being included in Hendon courses?

[slowsider]

That'll polish out.

[Horse]

Apparently...

" ... from the multi-million copy best-selling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman returns with the highly-anticipated Noise, a book about how to make better decisions. It teaches us how to understand all the extraneous factors that impact and bias our decision-making – and how to combat them and improve our thinking."

[Horse]

The idea that we learn better when taught via our preferred modality or “learning style” – such as visually, orally, or by doing – is not supported by evidence. Nonetheless the concept remains hugely popular, no doubt in part because learning via our preferred style can lead us to feel like we’ve learned more, even though we haven’t.

Some advocates of the learning styles approach argue that the reason for the lack of evidence to date is that students do so much of their learning outside of class. According to this view, psychologists have failed to find evidence for learning styles because they’ve focused too narrowly on whether it is beneficial to have congruence between teaching style and preferred learning style. Instead, they say psychologists should look for the beneficial effects of students studying outside of class in a manner that is consistent with their learning style.

For a new paper in Anatomical Sciences Education, a pair of researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine have conducted just such an investigation with hundreds of undergrads. Once again however the findings do not support the learning styles concept, reinforcing its reputation among mainstream psychologists as little more than a myth.


At the start of term, Polly Husmann and Valerie Dean O’Loughlin asked hundreds of undergrads on an anatomy course (which involved lectures and practical lab classes) to take one of the most popular online learning styles surveys, the VARK. Taken by millions of people worldwide, the VARK categorises students according to how much they prefer to learn visually, via auditory information, through reading and writing, or through kinaesthetics (by doing or by practical example).

The VARK website also offers study tips based on your supposed preferred learning style(s). The researchers encouraged their student participants to take the survey and to adopt the study practices consistent with their dominant learning style. Later in the term, the researchers surveyed them about the methods they’d actually used when studying outside of class, to see if they used methods in line with their supposed dominant learning style. Finally, the researchers accessed the students’ end-of-year grades to see if there was any association between grade performance, dominant learning style, and/or studying outside of class in a way consistent with one’s dominant learning style.

The results are bad news for advocates of the learning styles concept. Student grade performance was not correlated in any meaningful way with their dominant learning style or with any learning style(s) they scored highly on. Also, while most students (67 per cent) actually failed to study in a way consistent with their supposedly preferred learning style, those who did study in line with their dominant style did not achieve a better grade in their anatomy class than those who didn’t.

Instead, there were specific study strategies, such as practising microscope work and using lecture notes, that were associated with better grade performance, regardless of students’ learning style. Other activities, such as using flash cards, were associated with poorer performance, perhaps because they were a sign of learning by rote rather than deeper learning.

Husmann and O’Loughlin don’t pull any punches in their conclusion. Their findings, they write – especially when considered in the context of past research – “provide strong evidence that instructors and students should not be promoting the concept of learning styles for studying and/or for teaching interventions. Thus, the adage of ‘I can’t learn subject X because I am a visual learner’ should be put to rest once and for all.”

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/04/03/an ... ing-style/

[The Spin Doctor]

Hmm.

Interesting. Of course, one new paper doesn't mean a previously widely-held belief is actually wrong! Contrary research debunking long-held theories has been known to be wrong - spectacularly at times.

An open mind is definitely needed but it's when other researchers begin to confirm their work, that's time to shift position.

[iansoady]

One problem is that once someone has decided that they have a particular "learning style" it's very difficult to get them to accept any other. My wife is a classic case of learning by doing and totally refuses to read up on anything she may be wanting to learn. I'm the total opposite enjoying nothing more than sitting down witha workshop manual before tackling any job.

I have pointed out to her that "learning by mistakes" is fine if we're talking about planting bulbs but less use when drving ......

[Horse]

Of course, one new paper doesn't mean a previously widely-held belief is actually wrong! ... but it's when other researchers begin to confirm their work, that's time to shift position.

This is by no means the first research to come to this conclusion. Have a google, there's loads. Here's just a few:


http://www.educationalneuroscience.org. ... ng-styles/

The bottom line at the moment is that, as much as the idea is intuitively plausible, there’s no good evidence for the value of measuring or drawing on learning styles in schools. The verdict? Neuro-myth.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles

Many educational psychologists have shown that there is little evidence for the efficacy of most learning style models, and furthermore, that the models often rest on dubious theoretical grounds.[52][53] According to professor of education Steven Stahl, there has been an "utter failure to find that assessing children's learning styles and matching to instructional methods has any effect on their learning."[54] Professor of education Guy Claxton has questioned the extent that learning styles such as VARK are helpful, particularly as they can have a tendency to label children and therefore restrict learning.[55] Similarly, psychologist Kris Vasquez pointed out a number of problems with learning styles, including the lack of empirical evidence that learning styles are useful in producing student achievement, but also her more serious concern that the use of learning styles in the classroom could lead students to develop self-limiting implicit theories about themselves that could become self-fulfilling prophecies that are harmful, rather than beneficial, to the goal of serving student diversity.[6]

Some research has shown that long-term retention can better be achieved under conditions that seem more difficult, and that teaching students only in their preferred learning style is not effective.[56]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... ng-styles/

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/1 ... 09.01038.x

We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice.



Written to be entertaining:
https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/2017/1 ... rch-myths/

[The Spin Doctor]

This is by no means the first research to come to this conclusion. Have a google, there's loads. Here's just a few:

Fair enough... why didn't you say so?

Doing a bit more reading around, there seems to be evidence that delivering information via more than one modality improves learning... but only for some people... which could account for the idea that people have learning styles.

[Horse]

It's probably one small element. I found this a while ago made a note of it:

Good teaching (or training, if you prefer) often boils down to the same format whatever the context.

The local Council have just produced an excellent DVD for helping children with autism, particularly during the transition to secondary school. The DVD was made with help from several groups and agencies, including the famous Priors Court School.

To accompany the DVD, there's a credit card-sized concertina prompt sheet.

Awareness
Understanding
Tolerance
Interaction
Socialisation
Making School Work

On one side.

On the other (precid):

Communication - keep language simple
Social Understanding - unwritten social rules
Organisation - What, where, in what order, what next
Coping with Change - prepare in advance
Homework - what, how long

Now I'd say that was all 'good teaching' - and much of that list applies to rider training as much as anything else!

[The Spin Doctor]

Might have to nick that

[Horse]

I call that sort of mental pressure the 'mountain goat' effect; the goat sees fresh grass, so hops across. Goat doesn't care whether it's an 4" deep ornamental rill or a 4,000 ft ravine. If the *fail* riders had ignored the fence, they might well have been fine.

20210302_081847.jpg (114.28 KiB) Viewed 1504 times

Surprise!

[Horse]

[The Spin Doctor]

Just found a moment to watch that... some very relevant information to riding issues... so long as you don't think you just pick it all up by instinct.

[Horse]

More on decisions and the potential benefits from [good] training.

From here:
https://www.shadowboxtraining.com/news/ ... decisions/

The way you train people to make better decisions depends on how you think people actually make decisions. According to Rational Choice Theory (RCT), the dominant theory on decision making for decades, this is how to make good decisions: First, gather and analyze all the relevant information. Then come up with several options. Then compare those options against each other according to some set of pre-established evaluation criteria. The option with the best aggregate score is your decision. This approach is appealing because it’s logical, straightforward—and documentable. (Tip: If “CYA” is important to you, RCT is the way to go.)

Training people to make good decisions using RCT is also pretty straightforward: Teach the procedure. If you start with good information and follow the procedure logically, RCT promises to lead you to the optimal solution. Consultants innumerable have made fortunes training executives to Follow the Steps.

But here’s the dirty little secret: The RCT doesn’t work—or, at least, when push comes to shove, people don’t use it. At least not in situations typically characterized by uncertainty, ambiguity, time pressure, high stakes, and ill-defined, shifting, and often competing goals. You know, the Real World.

Making decisions in the real world
The Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) movement arose in the 1980s as an alternative to RCT to study how people make decisions in the real world. So, for example, how would you train people to make better decisions using Gary Klein’s Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model, one of the leading NDM models. According to the RPD, people make decisions by recognizing similarities to past experiences and leveraging their knowledge of those past experiences to conceive workable solutions. They don’t compare options against each other according to some arbitrary set of criteria: using their experience, they play each option out against the situation as a mental simulation, and they go with the first option that will work. They don’t optimize; they “satisfice,” to use the technical term.

You can’t teach the RPD by teaching the procedure, because there is no procedure. The process occurs naturally and intuitively. Because the RPD approach is based on experience, you don’t improve decision-making by improving the process; you improve decision-making by growing the experience base. The deeper the reservoir of experiences you have to draw from, the more different types of situations you will recognize—the more patterns you will recognize and the more variations on patterns you will recognize.

Components of decision skills training
So, the first—and essential—component of any decision skills training program is that it should be experiential and grounded within the domain in question. (Our experience suggests there is little value to generic decision training, although there may be some transfer between similar domains.) While direct experience may be the most powerful teacher, we have found that simulated experience (i.e., the use of training scenarios) and vicarious experience (i.e., learning from the experience of others) also can be very effective. We have also learned that a simulated experience does not have to have high physical fidelity to be effective—i.e., it does not have to reflect the physical world in great detail. A low-resolution simulation (like a simple decision-making exercise) can be just as effective as long as it has high cognitive fidelity—i.e., the decision it requires is realistic and challenging.

This leads to the second component of an effective decision skills training program: repetition. As in any exercise regimen, reps and sets matter. It is the repetitions that deepen the experience base. They build up the cognitive muscle memory if you will. In other words, you need a breadth of experience to be able to recognize different basic patterns, but you also ultimately need depth of experience to be able to recognize nuanced variations on those basic patterns.

The next key component is feedback, which accelerates the learning process. Experience alone may be a powerful teacher in the end, but it is an inefficient teacher. It may take us a number of repetitions to notice an important lesson, or we may initially even draw the wrong conclusion from our experiences. It helps considerably to receive tailored mentoring to help you get more out of the learning process—to point out the key insights you might otherwise miss, the potential flaws in your decision, or the key traps to avoid.

Next, the training should involve deliberate reflection on the key lessons. Requiring trainees to capture what they have learned in their own words—a process known in the literature as self-explanation—helps to internalize and consolidate the learning. Reflection can be accomplished through journaling or any other explanatory process.

The final element, which is an attribute of the training rather than a separate component, is that the training should be engaging. When people are engaged they become active participants in their own learning rather than passive receptors. If training is engaging, people will be more likely to stick with the training regimen. Experiential, scenario-based training tends to be more engaging than procedural training.

Summary
So, to come back to our original question: How do you train people to make better decisions? You develop an experiential, scenario-based training program based on varied repetition. You provide expert feedback to accelerate the learning curve. You require self-reflection to consolidate the lessons learned. And you make the training engaging.

[ZRX61]

I'll admit to making some really questionable decisions when I was working with pyro in my 20's. Two ended up with trips to the ER, one destroyed a pool table (& probably damaged the hearing of everyone in the pub), another removed the entire facade from a building & one wrote off a car.
The others all resulted in rather loud & sometimes VERY bright hilarity.

However, I did mange to stay alive.

My stupidity on motorcycles (mostly) pales into insignificance in comparison.

[Horse]

Two ended up with trips to the ER, one destroyed a pool table (& probably damaged the hearing of everyone on the puv)

Come on, can't leave it untold

[ZRX61]

Two ended up with trips to the ER, one destroyed a pool table (& probably damaged the hearing of everyone on the puv)

Come on, can't leave it untold

Threw something intended for outdoor use under a pool table to distract a mate as he took his shot. I'm not sure if it lifted the table far enough off the floor to break the slate as it landed or if the concussion broke it. I didn't see it as I'd stepped smartly through the door to the corridor that lead to the toilets before it went off. There was a bit more damage around the bar, but it was the pool table damage that got me banned. Off to the ER for stitches following the subsequent brawl in the beer garden out front (altho tbf, I did win that one). This was actually the second time I'd deafened everyone in that pub, the first time only resulted some torn clothing.
The really funny part was as I stepped through the door, someone I knew was coming back from the growler & I put my hand up to stop him going through the door into the bar. He got as far as "What did yo..." before there was an almighty bang from the other side of the door & he started giggling like a little girl.
Handed the same thing to same mate as he was arguing with the bouncers about not being allowed into a nightclub. I thought he'd walk out & throw it behind him. He didn't, he lit it & dropped it under the chair one the bouncers was sitting one. The entrance was a kinda conservatory looking addition on the front of the building. It ended up as a pile on the ground. I felt the blast from what I mistakenly considered to be a safe distance, turned around & unintentionally used my face to stop something. Off to the ER for stitches...
Didn't go back to that nightclub again...

[iansoady]

I'm glad I'm not one of your mates.......