Stories are effective tools for learning due to their ability to facilitate the following cognitive processes: i) concretizing, ii) assimilation, and iii) structurizing (Evans and Evans 1989).

“Men’s voices are associated with neutrality, with authoritative, factual information,” explains <a href="http://arthur-chu.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Arthur Chu</a>, a Cleveland-based artist who’s done voice over work for brands like Safeway and Intel. “The voiceover you want for some kind of authoritative instructional video, or something asserting dry historical fact, is going to be that baritone, somewhat monotone, slightly stern voice.”

“Because females tend to be the more nurturing gender by nature, their voices are often perceived as a helper, more compassionate, understanding, and non-threatening,” says <a href="http://www.debbiegrattan.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Debbie Grattan</a>, a veteran voice over artist for brands like Apple, Samsung, and Wal-Mart. “This can be important in instructional videos, (sense of patience and compassion in teaching a new skill), corporate/web narration, as well as commercial spots (conveying a less aggressive, more persuasive approach.)”

There was a marginal difference in percentage of extrinsic words recalled in female vs. male narrator. There was no difference in number of extrinsic words recalled in male-visual, male-no visual, female-visual, female-no visual.

However, when percentage of extrinsic words recalled was analyzed between male and female voice conditions, there was marginal significance, where subjects in the male voice condition recalled a greater percentage of extrinsic words than subjects in the female voice condition. This marginal significance is not enough to definitively conclude that there is a relationship between gender of narrator and recall of extrinsic words.

But most <a href="http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/lablouin/psych200/project_fall01/narrator.htm">studies</a> that I have seen indicate no statistically significant difference between retention by an audience of one gender of content delivered by a voice of another, or the same, gender. <br> <br>In my experience there are characteristics other than gender that play a much bigger role in engaging a learner audience. Things like dynamism, clarity, 'emotional bonding' with the content, enthusiasm, and perceived subject matter expertise are more important than whether it is a male or a female voice.

<p>Participants also indicated the types of assignment they feel are inappropriate for them. Most of the assignments refused could be characterized as “conventional.” Several participants specifically mentioned that they distance themselves from training about products and software to focus on more strategic projects.</p> <p>One participant avoids “order-taker projects.” </p>

To a certain extent, I feel the growth mindset is the equivalent of putting a penguin next to an eagle and inviting them to both take off. When the eagle is a speck in the sky, the observer then tells the penguin that the only reason it isn’t also flying is that it isn’t putting enough effort in. If only it flaps its wings harder, it’ll be chasing the eagle in no time.

A rare point of agreement between hard biodeterminists and hard socialists is that telling kids that they’re failing because they just don’t have the right work ethic is a <i>crappy thing to do</i>. It’s usually false and it will make them feel terrible. Behavioral genetics studies show pretty clearly that at least 50% of success at academics and <a href="slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/01/talents-part-2-attitude-vs-altitude/">sports</a> is genetic; various sociologists have put a lot of work into proving that your position in a biased society covers a pretty big portion of the remainder. If somebody who was born with the dice stacked against them works very hard, then they might find themselves at A2 above. To deny this in favor of a “everything is about how hard you work” is to offend the sensibilities of sensible people on the left and right alike.

So basically, you take the most vulnerable people, set them tasks you know they’ll fail at, then lecture them about how they only failed because of insufficient effort.

In a controlled experiment, participants listened to videotaped instruction presented in either narrative or expository form and presented at<br> either a normal or a moderately compressed rate. Results indicate a relationship between organization<br> and retention such that audience members retain more information when it is presented in a<br> narrative style and when it is presented at a normal presentation rate. Practically, the results suggest advantages for narrative form in the everyday practice of instructional communication.

We work in organizations that believe harmful myths. We’re pressured to work as if the myths are true, and we can’t or don’t take the time we need to keep our knowledge up to date and combat the myths.

<p>“The results we saw at Ctrip blew me away. Ctrip was thinking that it could save money on space and furniture if people worked from home and that the savings would outweigh the productivity hit it would take when employees left the discipline of the office environment.</p> <p>“Instead, we found that people working from home completed 13.5% more calls than the staff in the office did—meaning that Ctrip got almost an extra workday a week out of them. They also quit at half the rate of people in the office—way beyond what we anticipated. And predictably, at-home workers reported much higher job satisfaction.”</p>

<p>One other fascinating insight from the interview: Bloom notes that those who liked the work-at-home option most were people:</p> <p>” . . . who have established social lives—older workers, married workers, parents. We found that the younger workers whose social lives are more connected to the office tend to not want to work from home as much.</p>

<p>The MCPL literature suggests that for an FI to directly improve learning, rather than motivate learning, it has to help the recipient to <em>reject erroneous hypotheses.</em> Whereas correcting errors is a feature of some types of FI messages, most types of FI messages do not contain such information and therefore should not improve learning—a claim consistent with CAI research.</p> <p>Moreover, even in learning situations where performance seems to benefit from FIs, learning through <em>FIs may be inferior to learning through discovery</em> (learning based on feedback from the task, rather than on feedback from an external agent). Task feedback may force the participant to learn task rules and recognize errors (e.g., Frese &amp; Zapf, 1994), whereas FI may lead the participant to learn how to use the FI as a crutch, while shortcutting the need for task learning (cf. J. R. Anderson, 1987). </p>

In the MCPL literature, several reviewers doubt whether FIs have any learning value (Balzer et al., 1989; Brehmer, 1980) and suggest alternatives to FI for increasing learning, such as providing the learner with more task information (Balzer et al., 1989). Another alternative to an FI is designing work or learning<br> environments that encourage trial and error, thus maximizing learning from task feedback without a direct intervention (Frese &amp; Zapf, 1994).

<p>When you’re a domain expert in your field, it’s difficult to step back and remember what it was like to be a beginner. Once we have knowledge, it’s very hard to remember what life was like without it.</p> <p>Instead of placing the burden of training on a subject-matter expert, it’s often more effective to establish a collaboration between subject-matter experts and trainers who are experts in breaking down information, recognizing the critical elements, and putting it back together in a way that’s digestible for people who aren’t experts. </p>

The optimal video length is 6 minutes or shorter -- students watched most of the way through these short videos. In fact, the average engagement time of any video maxes out at 6 minutes, regardless of its length. And engagement times decrease as videos lengthen: For instance, on average students spent around 3 minutes on videos that are longer than 12 minutes, which means that they engaged with less than a quarter of the content.