Week 4 R/D 6

Before reading this chapter I didn’t even know the title “Human Performance Improvement.” If I had I would have assumed it involved merely teaching tasks in more effective ways. There were several ideas brought up in this chapter which I could apply to both my professional work and to my students.

The authors point out early in the chapter that when performance is not as good as expected, many instructional designers assume the cause is poor instruction when it could be several other causes. It is up to the instructional designer to fully analyse the problem from every angle to determine the correct cause of poor performance. This applies well to my professional work. When test scores are low, I have a tendency to jump to the conclusion that my lesson was bad. I can use this chapter to broaden my mind to at minimum entertain the possibility that other factors might be at play. I like the author’s reference several times in this chapter to a possible cause of inadequate performance being be a lack of timely and useful feedback. I can relate to the fact that this could be a factor affecting performance because I see this as a determent to my performance in the majority of online courses I have taken to date. An example of this would be the courses I have taken where the only feedback I receive from my instructor to my writings is a single numerical score. I personally find this lack of timely and useful feedback de-motivating.

I was a bit taken aback by the principles the authors quoted which he attributed to a study done by Gilbert in 1996 (page 137) . All four cited theorems were at first glance surprising but the one that I highlighted is the one that states that “ A system that rewards people for their behavior (e.g. hard work, knowledge, motivation) without accounting for accomplishment encourages incompetence.” The more I think about this the greater it becomes. As a teacher or a boss, I have to remember that I need to encourage a student’s hard work, knowledge and motivation but I need to keep asking the question “what did you accomplish?” To think that we are actually encouraging incompetence by rewarding hard work and motivation that accomplishes little, motivates me. The one thing I want to do the most is discourage incompetence!