A placebo effect?
Clark Quinn,
Learnlets,
May 30, 2023
This is a but of a puzzler, at least to my mind. There's good reason to believe that the usual content dump and knowledge test isn't effective, writes Clark Quinn. The belief that information presentation will lead to behavior change feels like a superstition, he writes. It's like a placebo - no useful learning has occurred, but the learner is expected to change nonetheless. I can see the reasoning; you can't just tell people what to do, you have to show them, and ideally, give them hands-on practice doing it. Still, a lot of the time, information presentation does lead to behaviour change. If it didn't, no advertising would work. Maps would be useless. We wouldn't be able to follow recipes. Contracts would be unenforceable. There would be no point running a traffic report on the radio. Etc., etc. So it seems to me that simply saying "information presentation doesn't work" contradicts the obvious evidence to the contrary. We need a more nuanced understanding, so we know why demonstration and practice are sometimes needed, and sometimes aren't.
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