Use of Real-Life Situations Key to Good Training, Study Finds
WASHINGTON — Human performance--in everything from sports to the military--could be greatly enhanced if current training methods were changed to reflect real-life situations, according to a report released Tuesday.
“Our findings point up the need to revamp the way people are trained in the military and many other occupations,” said Robert A. Bjork, a professor of psychology at UCLA.
“People learn by making and correcting mistakes,” added Bjork, chairman of the panel that prepared the report. “Excellent performance in the classroom does not necessarily predict good performance on the battlefield, on the shop floor or in the sports arena.”
The report, titled “In the Mind’s Eye,” was compiled by a committee of the National Research Council, the working arm of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. Both are private organizations that advise the federal government on science and technology.
Typical training programs often involve repetitive practice sessions held over a short period of time, but the real world is “messy,” rarely presenting people with repetitions of identical problems in similar situations, the study said.
A worker learning to repair a pump at a nuclear power plant, for example, should practice with several models of the pump under different conditions of heat and pump pressure, the document said.
The research was conducted at the request of the U.S. Army Research Institute, but the panel said that many of its findings could apply to many Americans in many occupations, not just to soldiers.
The report recommended that variable conditions be introduced into training sessions.
“In the sports context, for example, don’t just have the people sit there and shoot 40 free throws in a row without having to move their body position,” Bjork said. “Have them shoot after they do wind sprints. Narrow the rim . . . Have them shoot under different noise conditions.”
The panel also recommended that the frequency of feedback from instructors be decreased, since it is not typically available in real life.
In evaluating other training techniques, the panel also criticized the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a test given by the Army and by many companies to enhance career development.
The committee concluded that the test “can, at best, capture a person’s current state of mind” but “there is no evidence of a relationship between Myers-Briggs types and performance in particular occupations,” Bjork said.
Subliminal self-help tapes are also useless in changing or improving human behavior, the report said. The tapes, described by the panel as a more than $50 million-a-year business, purport “to help listeners stop smoking, improve their golf game, or become nicer people,” Bjork said.
The report found such claims unwarranted and said research on some tapes shows that their “embedded messages are below the level of subliminal perception.”
