<p><b>Questions:</b></p> <ol> <li>What do you expect learners to be able to DO after completing the course that they can’t do now?</li> <li>What are the consequences TO THE LEARNER if the learner fails to master the intended outcomes?</li> <li>Can you show me an active demonstration, a detailed simulation, or provide an opportunity to directly observe the desired performance?</li> <li>What specific performance mistakes do new learners regularly make?</li> <li>What tools, resources, job aids, or help do successful performers (or even experts) use to do these tasks?</li></ol>

1. Read what they gave you.

2. Involve them from the beginning

3. Ask them to help identify what people need to do<br> and why they aren’t doing it

4. Ask them to help brainstorm activities and limit information

<p>If your SME keeps suggesting fact checks instead of more realistic decision-making activities, you might try the following questions:</p> <ul> <li>If a person doesn’t know that fact, what do they do wrong on the job? How would that affect our goal?</li> <li>How could you tell by watching me do my job that I know that bit of information?</li> <li>What mistakes do new people make?</li> <li>What mistakes do people make when they get over-confident?</li></ul>

This helps remind the SME that the only information that should go into the material is the info that’s <strong>required to perform the activities</strong>

<p>Basically, the revelation that I had was — <strong><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);">I like right answers</span></strong>. &nbsp;I really like tidy right answers. &nbsp;I usually don’t ask learners questions that I don’t have a “right” answer or answers for. Even when the task is “authentic” and “embedded in context” I want there to be a right answer. &nbsp;And this <strong><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);">is </span></strong><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);"><strong>wrong</strong></span>.</p> <p>Because what Dan Myer is teaching his students is how to approach problems that don’t have right answers, which is the way that most of the problems in the real world work. &nbsp;His students are learning to be okay with that, and how to ask good questions, and how approach those problems.</p>

In other words, get the learner into a task quickly, and then provide content instruction through the feedback.

Numerous contradictions of cognitive load theory’s predictions have been found, but with germane cognitive load, they can still be explained away.&nbsp; de Jong does not use this term (unfalsifiable) but instead states that germane cognitive load is a <em>post-hoc</em> explanation with no theoretical basis: “there seems to be no grounds for asserting that processes that lead to (correct) schema acquisition will impose a higher cognitive load than learning processes that do not lead to (correct) schemas” (2009).

2. <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Poor external validity of lab-based studies</span>.&nbsp; Moreno doesn’t touch on something in the de Jong article – the fact that most cognitive load (and multimedia learning) studies are conducted in labs that “includes participants who have no specific interest in learning the domain involved and who are also given a very short study time” (de Jong, 2009), often only a few minutes.&nbsp; Quite a number of findings from these studies have not held up as strongly when tested in classrooms or real-world scenarios, or have even reversed (<a href="http://www.txwes.edu/professionaldevelopment/materials/Multimedia%20Instructions.pdf">such as the modality effect</a>, but see <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2007.09.010">this refutation</a> and this <a href="http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&amp;cpsidt=5135499">other example of a reverse effect</a>).