If you separate facts and concepts from the context in which they will use them, learners will simply forget them.
Under the title “What’s been did and 
what’s been hid,” here is the second of 12 truisms that have influenced how I have been doing my work as a learning and performance consultant over a number of years. I hope you will feel free to support it with a book reference, a personal experience or a case study, or knock it down using similar sources of evidence.
This is another simple idea; that if knowledge is set in a relevant context then a person will be motivated to learn it in order to use it in the performance of a task skilfully in the real world.
It is quite common to hear managers say, “We trained them and they passed a test; how is it possible for them to get things so badly wrong?”
Being able to demonstrate immediate recall of taught facts and concepts is not the same thing as being able to use those facts and apply those concepts when you need them in a real-world situation.
When you frame something as a learning objective instead of a performance objective, then it remains just another learning activity, divorced from the accomplishment of useful and practical tasks. To ensure its usefulness, knowledge should not be taught as an abstract thing to be activated on some vague and disconnected occasion in the future. Knowledge when learned must be focused or “situated” at the heart of some concrete action or experience.
When I think of “experience” I include the physical circumstances which a person learner will use what they learn – where they are and what they are about to do – as well as the cognitive and physical tasks they will perform when they are in that environment.
Instruction has to get as close as possible to replicating the same situations – the authentic operations, genuine tools and real equipment – as the real-world practical experience. The closer it is to a specific task-related performance in terms of the standard, quality, completeness and authenticity it demands, the greater is the effectiveness of instruction.
Situated teaching puts the trainer in the role of a master practitioner, modelling performance to a necessary standard, recognising the extent of learners’ mastery as they practise, and interactively guiding them towards competence though coaching and feedback.
Instruction should take a learner only as far as the level of competence they need in the practical situation. For example a first-aider would not need to know as much about respiration as a doctor in a hospital, so the provision of instruction has to fit the expected condition and standards of performance.
In many cases, we have to think of reaching mastery through a series of successive approximations to the genuine whole performance with all of its internal and external conditions. The way of presenting a task may vary according to the prior knowledge of the learner. In some instances it may be enough to provide text or symbolic representations, but for novices it might be necessary to immerse them in a high fidelity simulation of the practical situation.
Computer-simulations of a situated practice environment can be effective, and in some cases students who have practised hard on a computer can accelerate their learning to match the performance of technicians with years of experience on-the-job.
When their learning is “situated”, learners may assess their own and others’ performance, but there are issues attending this approach. We’ll raise those issues when we look at truisms 3 (It is a good idea to put students in control of their own learning, and they are capable of accepting that control) and 10 (Learners who work together, and support and challenge one another, learn more than those who learn in isolation.)
Finally there is the question of attrition – the belief that knowledge decays rapidly unless you use it. Is that true or is it a widespread misconception?
I’m inviting you to support any of the statements above with a book reference, a personal experience or a case study, or contradict them by using similar sources of evidence. Please use the form below if you wish to comment.
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