Host: Welcome to CET Talks, the International Accreditors for Continuing Education and Training podcast, where we convene thought leaders in the continuing education and training ecosystem to share ideas, research best practices, and experiences that promote the creation of a world that learns better. Enjoy the episode.

Randy Bowman: Hello and welcome to CET Talks. My name is Randy Bowman. IACET’s President and CEO.

Mike Veny:  And I am CET Talks co-host, Mike Veny, certified corporate wellness specialist and the CEO of an IACET-accredited provider. Hello, Randy.

Randy Bowman:  Hey, how have you been?

Mike Veny:  I’m good. I wanted to tell you about a class that I took recently. It gave me an assessment on learning style, and I learned that according to the assessment, I’m a visual learner. And I was surprised. I wanted to ask you about this because I’m a musician, and I feel like I learn better through listening and do audio books better. What are your thoughts on this?

Randy Bowman:  A visual learner? That’s funny. You know, Mike, I have to admit, I’m kind of contrarian and a little bit skeptical about those kinds of assessments. I mean, anytime you do a self-reported assessment like that, they’re so easy to get. They’re so easy to game. I find myself actually doing it when I’m taking it, going, “Oh, if I answer this, I know it’s going to turn out that way.” I don’t know. Did you ever do that thing as a kid where you take an empty paper towel holder, hold it up to your eye with one hand, and then take your other hand and put it two thirds of the way down? Your brain blends the images so that you have this hole in your hand. If I were to do that and then take a self-assessment, I might find out that I have holey hands. Right. I don’t know. Our perceptions of ourselves can be so tricky, so I tend to be a little skeptical. That’s why I’m so excited to have our guest with us today, Dr. Clark Quinn, to talk about myths that surround modern day learning and the science. He can tell us a little bit more about what the science actually tells us. For our listeners out there, if you don’t know who Clark is, he is the Executive Director of Quinnovation and Co-Director of the Learning Development Accelerator. In addition to several other roles and volunteer engagements, he is a speaker, consultant, and author of seven books, with broad experience in cognitive science, technology, and strategic decision making. Clark, thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr. Quinn Clark: A pleasure and an honor to be here with you.

Randy Bowman: Just to get us started here, can you give our listeners some examples of these so-called ‘learning myths,’ and why they persist in the training industry despite evidence to the contrary?

Dr. Quinn Clark: Some of the examples of learning styles is a perfect example of one that is extremely persistent; lots of people believe it and it’s just wrong. And yet it’s very hard to kill. We refer to it as a “zombie.” Other ones are generations. People really like that, and yet the evidence is that we differ by age, but creating those artificial buckets doesn’t work. “Attention span of a goldfish” is another one. People were touting that for quite a while, and we hear it from marketing and yet it isn’t relevant. And the reason is, we like to have explanations for the world we observe. It seems like our attention has decreased. It seems like learners differ. We actually know learners differ. Anybody who’s ever taught can tell learners differ. The question is, can we reliably identify it, and does it make a difference? When we study these things, we find out that while the explanations are appealing, they’re not valid and so we have to be resistant. Learning styles, sure, learners differ, but when we look at should we design learning to a different style, we find no evidence that makes any difference at all. You really should be designing for the learning outcome you’re trying to achieve. For each of these things, there are better ways to address them than what the myth would have you do it. And yet people believe it when they’re confronted with the evidence. Most people rationally will recognize the problem, but you have to be careful how you do it.

Mike Veny: Thank you for sharing that. As a person who does a lot in mental health, I just recently learned that trigger warnings on things, which you hear a lot about a lot. If something is a very sensitive topic, don’t really do anything because it doesn’t stop you from being triggered. It’s really interesting how we’re talking about this in your book, Millennials, Goldfish and Other Training Misconceptions. Love the title by the way. You differentiate between learning myths, learning superstitions, and learning misconceptions. Can you explain what those differences are and share some examples of what you would consider to be in each category?

Dr. Quinn Clark:  Absolutely. When I wanted to address beliefs people had—I was asked by ATD to do this—I realized some things people will adhere to that have been systematically studied. Other things are practices nobody will claim they adhere to, and yet we see them manifest in the actual practices and outputs that come from organizations. And then there are things that people disagree about. Some people think it’s wonderful and some people don’t. The other two, we may have data about. So to me, the first group is myth; things that have been systematically studied and proven to be not helpful. That’s a myth. A superstition is something nobody will agree on. They say that they support like, oh, information dump, but nobody really believes that’s a valuable thing to do. They know telling aid, training, and yet too many organizations still do it in terms of the training they provide. Those to me are superstitions. And then misconceptions are those things that some people believe, and some people don’t, and they argue about “Is this real or is it not?” And to me it’s really an issue of “When does it make sense and when does it not make sense?” Helping people understand that helps them figure out whether it’s relevant to them or not, whether they should fight against it or not.

Mike Veny: Well, to anyone who is listening out there who is an instructional designer, I’m thinking about instructional designers I know. If they heard all of this, it might be frustrating, especially if you’ve had years of schooling and training around some of these misconceptions in this. So, for the instructional designers out there, what practices would you recommend that they use to effectively combat and dispel learning myths in their organizations? And how do they know if something is true or not? How do you go about that?

Dr. Quinn Clark:  Well, there’s a couple things. When you confront myths, you need to acknowledge the appeal first. People resist being told they’re wrong. So, how do we come forward? You mentioned triggers that happen anyways; what do you do about it? One of the things is to acknowledge that these things have appeal, and you can even adjust what I did in the book. I tried to talk about what would be good if it were true, but what would be bad if it were false? And then you go, “Well, what does the research say?” I think another important component is to give them something alternate to do. Don’t just say that’s wrong, but what do I do? Give them some other approach. It actually isn’t bad to give people information in different ways, but it’s not because of learning styles. You don’t design for learning styles. It’s because multiple representations of it increase the likelihood of being processed and remembered. Once you understand it in one way, that gives you a mechanism to understand it another way. I think it’s important to help people understand when it makes sense and when it doesn’t. One of the things we know is that just purely rational logical arguments aren’t always the best way to do it. Acknowledge the emotional issues involved, as well. Then present alternates that give people a successful path to follow that is more appropriate for their learners. Talk about the benefits of the outcomes of doing it the right way. How do you do this? How do you stay on top of what’s happening? I don’t really recommend everybody go and try and read the learning science in the original academies. It’s difficult. It takes a lot of training and it’s really painful in many instances. So I instead suggest a couple things. There are some research approaches. In the Learning Development Accelerator, we propose a research checklist, a set of steps you can follow to try, and if it’s not relevant to you, don’t bother about it at all. If it is relevant to you now, who’s telling you and who’s opposing it and what are their vested interests and so on. We want to evaluate the argument, as well as who’s pushing it and what best interests they might have. Alex Edmonds in his book, May Contain Lies, that my co-director of the LDA really thought was a valid book. We had him on for an author conversation, and he has an information letter that says, “Just because it’s data, it doesn’t mean it’s information. Just because it’s information, it doesn’t mean it’s research,” et cetera, et cetera. I don’t remember the exact details of the latter, but it’s a really systematic approach to help keep you from falling into some of the traps that people who have a vested interest might want to make you. There are research translators, people who have established a reputation for being able to read the research and report reliably on it. This is people like Will Heimer and Patty Shank and Jane Boar and Connie Malamed. They’re people that you should see what they say about anything that comes across, or that you’re transom and somebody’s pushing and saying this; well, what do those people have to say about it? Have they evaluated it? And there’s more of them, but there’s a lot of people who will tout things and they shouldn’t be trusted. It’s the people who have established a regular reputation for doing this reliably and comprehensibly. They do read the original research; they do translate into what it means for practice in ways that are aligned with what learning science tells us.

Mike Veny: Well, thank you for sharing that. It reminds me of one of the trainings we have on layoff news. It’s a course on resilience during a recession and learning to evaluate the news that you look at to make sure it’s reliable, because we get a lot of what some people call fake news. Just so I understand you, and everyone out there understands you for figuring out if something is a myth or a misconception. For example, I know our company is talking about nano learning now, which is these one minute courses and what you’re suggesting—oh my, listeners out there, if you could just see the look on his face right there as I said that—but basically what you’re saying to me and others out there, is you need to have some kind of due diligence system in place with all these things. Is that correct?

Dr. Quinn Clark:  Roughly, yes. You should have a professional portfolio of things you know are relevant and when somebody’s giving you a new one, you need to evaluate it and say, “Does this make sense for me, for our company, for our learners? Is there validity to investing in this or not? We have a tendency as an industry to get excited about the newest technology; it’s AR and VR, and now it’s generative AI. It’s the panacea that will solve all our problems, and you have to cut through that. Being a late adopter isn’t a bad strategy by the way, in these instances. You get pushed because you want to get the best advantage, but if you go in too early, you spend way too much money because the market hasn’t sorted out. For instance, in AR and VR, we still really don’t have standards. You either go with this platform or that platform or whatever it does, instead of being able to say, “Okay, I can create this and produce for both.” This is changing as we speak. Generative AI, there’s so many companies coming out; not all of them are going to succeed. They can’t. It’s just not that big, as much as it seems like a huge marketplace. I think there was a person who spoke at a conference recently and showed the geometric growth of the number of companies that were coming out, and that just isn’t sustainable. What will happen is it’ll shake out and some will happen like this happened with internet companies and everything else. If you get in too early, the company you’re investing in may or may not be one that survives. Now you can if you’re going to abstract the principles and move it over. But the point being, yes, you do want to have some systematic way to deal with new claims and have your approach grounded in good research science, and then anything that anybody wants to add, be scrutable about how you evaluate it and add it to your repertoire.

Randy Bowman: One of the things you said is sometimes myths can be dangerous and sometimes they’re not. Can you give me some examples of a myth that, when it’s when you follow it and take it on as truth, it’s dangerous, and maybe one that, yeah, okay, it’s a myth, but if you follow it, that’s probably not going to harm you or your learners or your company in any way.

Dr. Quinn Clark:  Actually, I’m not sure there are any that are essentially harmless. I think they all carry baggage with them. First of all, if you’re spending any effort to address it, you are probably wasting time and money. If you, for instance, create multiple differences for categories that aren’t legitimate, you are spending unnecessary effort. But more than that, you can be actually doing harm to their learning. If the outcome of their objective of this learning is something important, it costs the company lots of money, or people live or die and you’re not doing it appropriately, that’s a problem. Now, places where people live or die tend to pay more attention to learning science. So, in aviation and military and medicine, they do a lot of practice and things, but even there they’re not always optimal and have room for improvement. They seldom do things that are harmful; they just may not do things as efficiently as possible. But in general, myths are problematic. Superstitions, similarly, we already talked about learning styles, generations, attention span of goldfish. Superstitions are things like “Information presentation leads to behavior change.” Nobody really claims that, and yet they still do a lot of it. We have awareness training. What does that possibly do? Misconceptions are things like “70, 20, 10.” Well, sometimes if you need to convince people to invest more and going beyond just a course, that may be a useful thing to address executives. Other people, it’s not, the numbers are made up. They have some legitimacy, but it’s not a robust concept. Nobody has numbers that line up that perfectly, so don’t spend your money 70, 20 10. That’s not what the argument is. But if you need help to help people understand that a lot of your learning isn’t just from that initial course, it may be useful tool. But all of those things—if you misinterpret them, if you misappropriate use them—are wasting time and money, if nothing else. So, I’m not sure I can think of any myths that we bother fighting about. If we’re going to fight about it, that’s because we think it’s costing you money; it’s causing damage.

Randy Bowman: Right. Awesome. Yeah, thanks. You know, that’s an important thing to think about as well. I mean, otherwise, we wouldn’t care if it didn’t cause harm, right? So, all the myths have that potential to cause harm either to the organization, to the learner, or the even the facilitator, in some way. Clark, it’s been wonderful to have you here today. There’s so much and I follow some of your YouTube presentations, and I love them. As we end up here, the last question we like to ask all of our guests is, what does a world that learns better look like to you?

Dr. Quinn Clark: I think there’s two things that matter. One is people have to maintain their curiosity. Stay curious, my friends. Seriously, you have to have that growth mindset that says, “I’m not fixed, I’m not immutable. The world is changing and I’m curious and I want to know what’s changing.” Then the second thing is to be effective at it. I like Harold Jarche’s, “Seek, Sense, Share”, his personal knowledge mastery approach, because it gives you tools. We aren’t actually taught how to be good learners. When in K-12, higher ed, and in organizations, those learning-to-learn skills are not talked about explicitly. They’re not developed explicitly. We have a lot of, “Oh well, we require it, therefore they develop it.” That’s a myth. So way back when, with games, Kathy Sherwood from Griffith University was looking at Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? You may remember that game. The claim was that you learn about geography and culture and society, and that actually wasn’t true. You actually learned how to use an almanac; you didn’t learn all those details, you learned how to look up details. Similarly, when we had those games for our kids that said, ‘teach problem solving’, no, they required problem solving, but they didn’t teach it. Many times ‘problem solving’ meant going out on the street and asking your friends and coming back and bringing that knowledge back instead of figuring it out. So to me, what a world that learns better looks like are people who want to keep learning and know how to do it effectively.

Mike Veny:  Clark, thank you so much for this interview. I just have so many more questions, but we are out of time. Took a lot of notes here, and Randy, I don’t know about you, but after this interview, I want to question everything. In the world of mental health, one of the questions that I encourage people to ask is “What story am I telling myself, and how do I know this to be true?” And I think that was, in many ways, a theme of today’s interview. What about you?

Randy Bowman:  Well, Mike, first of all, welcome to my world of skepticism; I’m glad to have you on board. You know, what I took away the most is this distinction between the learning myths and superstitions and misconceptions. It really gave me a better framework for identifying and categorizing these various false beliefs. They’re not all the same, and it’s good to be able to distinguish between them in the field. That was my key takeaway today.

Mike Veny: Awesome. Well, as we wrap up today’s discussion on the importance of training myths and misconceptions, we’d love to hear from you what training myths really grind your gears, and what experiences do you have in busting those myths. Please share your experiences, insights, and ideas for future topics on our LinkedIn page. Your stories can provide invaluable lessons and inspiration for others navigating similar paths. We certainly hope you’ll subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast platform, so you don’t miss any episodes. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Host: You’ve been listening to CET Talks, the official podcast of IACET. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcast. To learn more about IACET visit IACET.org, that’s I-A-C-E-T.org. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with the new episode.