5. How do you Get their Attention?

(IN WHICH WE LEARN HOW TO TALK TO THE ELEPHANT)

In our current world of 24-hour-a-day distractions, this is pretty much everybody; we all have an excess of things that try to command our time and attention. And attention is pretty critical, right? If your learners aren’t paying attention, then it doesn’t matter what kind of learning experience you’ve created—they aren’t getting much from it.

So how do you get your learner’s attention? Well, to do that, you have to talk to the elephant.

The rider is ... conscious, controlled thought. The elephant, in contrast, is everything else. The elephant includes the gut feelings, visceral reactions, emotions, and intuitions that comprise much of the automatic system.

He is talking about the idea that there are two separate parts of your brain that are in control—the conscious, verbal, thinking brain and the automatic, emotional, visceral brain.

The elephant wants, but the rider restrains that wanting. This is a really useful evolutionary advantage—the rider allows you to plan ahead and to sacrifice short-term wants for long-term gains.

And sometimes that thought seems justified, because (again, sometimes) the elephant is willing and goes along with the rider pretty easily.

But other times, the elephant is going to do what it wants to, regardless of what the rider says.

And when the elephant and the rider are in serious conflict, guess who usually wins.

Exactly.

They look uncomfortably familiar, don’t they? The important point is that if the elephant isn’t engaged, the learner is going to have a heck of a time paying attention. But the rider can force the elephant to pay attention. We do it all the time. Any time you have forced yourself to complete a complicated homework assignment, fill out a tax return, or understand a legal document, you’ve been dragging your elephant along.

There’s a cost to this, though. Dragging an elephant where it doesn’t want to go is exhausting, cognitively speaking. We have to expend a lot of willpower to make it happen, and willpower gets used up pretty quickly.

In a study (Shiv 1999) participants were asked to remember either a two-digit number or a seven-digit number. They were subsequently offered a snack choice of either fruit salad or a piece of cake.

Approximately twice as many people chose cake in the seven-digit group as in the two-digit group.

This suggests that the cognitive resources of memory, focus, and control are finite. You can control the elephant, just not for very long. There have been a number of studies that suggest that self-control is a limited and exhaustible resource (Gailliot 2007; Vohs 2007). If your learners are having to force themselves to pay attention, there’s a limit to how long they are going to be able to exert the control necessary to do so.

Asking your learners to rely entirely on willpower and concentration is like asking the rider to drag the elephant uphill. (Note: Bicycling images are based on work I did at Allen Interactions and are used with their generous permission.)

Read the following paragraph:

Right-of-way and yielding laws help traffic flow smoothly and safely. They are based on courtesy and common sense. Violation of these laws is a leading cause of traffic crashes. When two vehicles reach an intersection at the same time, and there is no traffic light or signal, the driver of the vehicle on the left must yield to the vehicle on the right.

When two vehicles reach an intersection at the same time, and all-way stop signs or flashing red traffic lights control the intersection, the driver on the left must yield right of way to the driver on the right. (Minnesota Driver’s Manual, p. 41)

How much effort did you have to put in to processing that text? It’s not a particularly difficult concept, but your rider probably had to force your elephant to pay attention, and you had to put effort into translating the text into a visual so you could parse the information correctly.

Think about how that process feels. Unless you teach driver’s ed or have a geeky fondness for driving regulations, it probably felt effortful and mildly unpleasant to have to force yourself to read and comprehend that passage. Just the kind of thing to make that chocolate cake look mighty appealing.

Think about your answer to the following questions:

#1 Would you rather have $10 today or $11 tomorrow?

#2 Would you rather have $10 today or $11 in a year?

#3 Would you rather have $10 today or $1000 in a year?

When I’ve asked these questions of audiences in the past, I’ve gotten about a 50/50 split on question #1, everybody wanting the money today in question #2, and everybody willing to wait in question #3.

Basically, if the reward is big enough, we are willing to wait for it, but if it’s not very big we aren’t as interested.

If you think of this in learning terms, you have a similar transaction with your learners. You are asking them to pay attention to the lesson, and the reward for learning is getting to use what they’ve learned. Like money, attention is a resource that they can allocate (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we talk about “paying” attention).

If they can use it immediately, it’s not hard to pay attention, but if they can’t use it immediately, it’s much harder to remain attentive, even if the information is useful.

Think if it this way. If you had to rate your interest level in watching a video on printer repair, would you say that you were 1) Not interested at all 2) Somewhat interested or 3) Very interested?

I’m going to take a wild guess that you picked “1) Not interested at all.” I could be wrong—you might have a long-standing interest in printer repair—but for most of us, this is not that interesting a topic.

Now imagine that you’ve got twenty minutes to print your loan application/grad school application/tax return/client proposal so you can get it in the mail by the deadline, and your printer is broken. How interested are you in videos of printer repair now?

Your level of interest didn’t change because the video was different in the second scenario. It didn’t magically become a wacky, entertaining, humorous video on printer repair. Engagement is often not property of the learning materials, but something that the learner brings when the materials are relevant or timely.

You can use this one of two ways. You can move the point of learning closer to the point of use (a just-in-time video that the learner watches only when they need it), or, if that’s not possible, you can move the point of use closer to the point of learning, by using a scenario or problem for the learner to solve (more on that shortly).

In the next section, we’ll take a closer look at techniques for attracting the elephant, but all of them should be used with caution. The techniques that can be used effectively to attract the elephant can sometimes be too effective.

If the elements used to get the elephant’s attention are not intrinsic to the learning subject matter and activities, then they can have a negative effect on learning and retention (Thalheimer 2004).

• Tell it stories.

• Surprise it.

• Show it shiny things.

• Tell it all the other elephants are doing it.

• Leverage the elephant’s habits.

My friend Karen can’t tell left from right. Just can’t do it. When she really needs to know, she still holds up both hands to see which one forms the “L” for left.

As you might imagine, this is a bit of a problem while she’s driving. She has a hard time following directions, and meeting another car at a four-way stop is practically cause for a panic attack.

She knows that the driver on the right gets to go first, but between the difficulty of figuring out which one is on the right and the inevitable second-guessing of that, she ends up doing a dance of start-stop-staaaart-stop-STOP until she winds up waving the other driver through regardless of who actually had the right of way.

I tried to convince her to put “Left” and “Right” signs in her car, but she said that was too embarrassing.

In the end, we glued a small lighthouse statue (a relic of some childhood vacation to the seashore) to the far right side of her dashboard. We refer to it as her “Right-light,” and she always tells herself that if the other car is on the right-light side, then that car has the right of way.

Compare the experience of reading that passage to the experience of reading the passage about right-of-way and yielding laws earlier in this chapter. Which one required more effort? Was one passage easier to picture in your mind?

I think for most people, the story about Karen is probably easier to read and easier to visualize. It’s also likely that you could re-tell Karen’s story with reasonable accuracy, even after some time has elapsed.

So what is it about stories that make them useful learning tools?

• They go on existing shelves. You already have a set of story shelves—you know how they work and what the parts of a story are. You know there’s usually a main character, some kind of problem, and then a resolution of that problem. Some of this is culturally derived. If you are from the USA you might have a different story template than someone from Japan or someone from Malawi, but you already have shelves on which to put the story details.

• There’s a logical flow. Stories usually involve sequenced events, and they frequently follow a chronological flow. You are more like to remember the sequence of crawl > walk > run than you are to remember the sequence of walk > run > crawl because there’s a logical flow. Part of the promise of stories is that they will also have a logical flow involving cause and effect, and when you are recalling them, you can use that logic to recall what the events are. If someone retells the Karen story, they probably won’t talk about the lighthouse on the dashboard before they talk about Karen’s behavior at four-way stops.

• Stories create suspense. Whenever somebody starts telling you a story, there’s an implied puzzle that you start trying to solve. What’s the point of the story? Is it supposed to be funny? Is it going to be surprising? You start making predictions (“hmm...I know where this story is going...”) or anticipating the purpose and outcome. The elephant likes puzzles (we’ll talk more about this later in this chapter).

• Stories aren’t boring (we hope). Of course there can be bad stories or tedious stories (let’s face it, the Karen story isn’t going to win any literary awards), but when someone starts telling a story, the implied promise is that there’s an interesting reason for this story and therefore you should pay attention.

A friend of mine who is a game designer says the purpose of game design is to make the player feel smart. Sebastian Deterding, a game researcher and academic, describes it this way:

Games satisfy one of our three innate psychological needs—namely, the need to experience competence, our ability to control and affect our environment, and to get better at it. (Deterding 2011)

I think we have a similar responsibility when we design learning experiences, but I think our responsibility is to make the learner feel capable.

So how can your learners feel more capable?

• Show them the before and after. Your learner should be able to see how they will be different if they master the skills. What will they be able to do that they can’t do now? Will they be more capable? Will they be able to handle problems that they can’t right now? Will they have new tools to put in their professional toolbox? Show the learners what they can do and how they can get there.

• Give them real achievements. Let them do meaningful things with the material while they are learning about it. Organize your content around those achievements. For example, which beginning Photoshop class would you rather take?

Photoshop for Beginners - Lesson Outline

Which one is more likely to make the learner feel like they can actually accomplish something using the tool?

• Create a first-person puzzle to solve. Use a first-person story that runs through the whole learning experience. Say you’re taking a sales course to teach you the features and benefits of a new product. How would you react to an opening slide that read “In this lesson, you will learn the features, benefits, and sales techniques for the Turboloader 3000” compared to one that showed a friendly agent in an open doorway, saying “The new Turboloader 3000 that just came in looks awesome! Hey, isn’t your main client looking for a Turboloader? She’s coming in today, isn’t she?”

Suddenly, there’s a reason to pay attention to the information. There’s a goal, and time pressure, and a sense of urgency that “Learn about all the features and benefits of the Turboloader 3000” just doesn’t instill.

Stephen Covey’s 2x2 matrix of urgent versus important tasks highlights the fact that we frequently attend to the urgent rather than the important. Of course, we deal first with things that are both urgent and important, but after that, we tend to deal with the urgent (the email that just popped into the box) ahead of the important (the report due at the end of the week).

This is because the elephant is much more attuned to what feels urgent and immediate. Although learning to focus on the important may be a good life skill for individuals, it doesn’t help you when designing learning that engages the elephant.

Remember the “things that can kill you” chart from Chapter 4? We are wired to pay attention to urgent things, because we evolved in an environment where “urgent” was frequently equivalent to “things that can kill you.”

So which approach do you think would be more compelling for the elephant?

I wince now to think of when I was a new teacher and said things like “This is really important stuff” or “You’ll be really glad you know this stuff later on.” You can’t capture the elephant’s attention by just asserting that a topic is important. The rider may believe you when you say things like that, but the elephant knows better.

So what elements can you use to create a sense of urgency?

• A compelling story. Use classic storytelling elements to create a compelling scenario. Have a protagonist who is trying to accomplish a goal. Have an antagonist who is preventing the protagonist from accomplishing that goal. Have obstacles along the way that the protagonist must overcome. Have an inciting incident that sets up the drama of the story—a conflict that needs to be resolved. Make it so the protagonist needs to change and grow to overcome the obstacles.

• Showing, not telling. The elephant is pretty smart. It’s not just going to take your word for it that something is important. It wants to SEE and FEEL the importance. This is one of the golden rules of fiction writing and movie-making: Avoid heavy-handed exposition, and instead use visuals, action, and dialogue.

• Constraint of time or resources. One indisputable way to raise the level of urgency is to create constraints. Give people time constraints or resource constraints and set them at a problem. Use caution here, however. Your learners will not appreciate having only five minutes to complete a 20-minute task; 15 to 18 minutes to complete a 20-minute task creates a sense of urgency. Five minutes to complete a 20-minute task creates pissed-off learners.

• Immediacy. In learning environments, we tend to focus on future consequences and outcomes, but the elephant is a creature of immediacy. Things that are going to happen in the future, regardless of how dire they are, are less compelling to the elephant than things that are happening RIGHT NOW. That’s why “You may need to know these safety evacuation procedures” is far less compelling than “A fire just broke out on the 8th floor! Quick—what do you need to do first?”

• Interesting dilemmas. Give your learners interesting choices to make. Dilemmas capture attention if they are done well. The primary key to this is to not use right/wrong options. You can’t wring much tension out of a right/wrong choice. Better options include choices between:

- A good option and a very good option

- Two bad options

- Good, better, and best options

- Two options that are each a mixture of good and bad, but in different ways.

Well-designed games can provide fantastic examples of compelling dilemmas using constrained resources as pressure: Do you spend half your money to buy the railroad in Monopoly, knowing that it’s a safer bet but will ultimately be worth less than holding out for the third green property? Either choice could be good or bad, depending on the circumstances.

• Consequences, not feedback. This goes back to the notion of show, don’t tell, but uses actual consequences rather than feedback when people make choices in a learning scenario.

For a long time, there was a myth of “rational decision-making”—that the best way to make decisions was to rationally weigh the pros and cons and not let messy emotions interfere.

Antonio Damasio, a behavioral neuroscientist, examined this idea by looking at patients who had brain damage in areas of the brain that support emotion. Rather than being clear and incisive decision-makers due to the absence of emotions, these patients found even simple decision-making to be extremely difficult. We seem to need an emotional “tug” to help us decide.

When we teach people facts that are stripped of broader context, we make it hard for those learners to act on that information. Of course, the necessity of emotional context varies depending on the subject matter. If I’m creating learning materials to teach bar staff how to use a cash register, I’m not going to be overly concerned with the emotional context. If I’m teaching that same group how to ensure that they aren’t serving alcohol to underage or overly intoxicated drinkers, I’m going to be much more concerned about the emotional context.

Take a look at the following statement from a sales course:

The sales commission on repeat sales is 10 percent.

This looks like the mother of all objective facts, right? Just another certainty to put on your list. But what happens if we add a little emotional context to that fact?

Facts are frequently meaningless to us until we see them in some kind of broader context that allows us to begin to make judgments about them.

Each picture on the previous page tells us a different story about how we should feel about a 10 percent sales commission. Maybe it’s an awesome thing because industry standard is 4 percent. Maybe it’s infuriating because the salesperson is used to a 30 percent commission.

We believe that there are “objective facts,” but all valuable information has meaning only in a bigger context, and part of that context is emotional. If you don’t use that context in learning design, your learner may gather facts, but they won’t know how to feel about those facts. If they don’t know how to feel about them, they won’t know what to do with them.

For example, when I was growing up, I got a birthday card from my grandmother every year with a check for five dollars. Now this was always pleasing, because I love my grandmother and it was really sweet of her to do that, but the five dollars itself stopped being particularly exciting after about the age of twelve. There was always pleasure at the gesture from Grandma, but very little buzz around the money itself.

Compare that to the feeling you get when you are walking down the street and find five dollars lying on the ground, with no obvious owner in sight.

I don’t know about you, but if I find five dollars lying on the ground, that’s kind of awesome (“SCORE!”). And I probably keep a closer eye on the ground for a while after that happens.

The amount of money is the same in both examples, but the reaction is very different, due to the unexpectedness.

This tendency to react more strongly to unexpected rewards can be a valuable survival characteristic. Basically, if something is good, we want to remember that because we want more. And if something is bad, we want to remember that too, so we can avoid it in the future. But if something is exactly the way we thought it would be, there’s really no reason to allocate mental resources to reinforcing that thought or idea.

Our apparently very-human reaction to an unexpected reward is a big part of why slot machines are so effective. They provide a variable reward schedule, which means we can’t predict when we will get a win from the machine, so it’s always a surprise when it happens. Unexpectedness is also part of our enjoyment of other entertainments, like sports or comedy.

Video games also do this well—we will be going along, collecting gold coins, when suddenly, after the 35th gold coin, we get the SUPER PLATINUM HAMMER OF DEATH. When something like that happens, we immediately start looking for the pattern. What was I doing that caused that to happen? What can I do to make it happen again?

In contrast, feedback in a lot of elearning is almost mind-numbingly consistent:

There are reasons why consistency can be helpful. The main one is reducing cognitive load. If an interface element (like a feedback box) is consistent, then I learn it once and don’t have to allocate mental resources toward identifying its purpose after that. The problem with too much consistency is that I will start to ignore the box altogether pretty quickly.

If you are in a training class for a new computer system, and the instructor says, “OK, I’m going to start with the 37 main features of the system, with definitions of the functions for each feature,” would you say “All right! Bring ‘em on!” or would you say “Just kill me now...”?

But before you have a chance to say either, the instructor goes on to say, “Just kidding—we’re just going to focus on the three most critical features. The rest of that stuff is in your manuals.” Would you be more likely to pay attention to those three features at that point?

Let’s say you are walking down the street one day and you see a purple dog.

We’ve already talked about how you probably have a whole set of shelves in your closet for dogs. You probably have a pretty detailed mental model for dogs. But unless you have a traumatic dog-painting incident in your childhood, you probably don’t have “purple” as part of your mental dog model.

So when you see the dog, you are comparing what you see with your existing formula for dogs (right size, right shape, right texture, right movement, right sounds—yep, it’s a dog), but it’s not the right color. There’s enough there that does match your definition of dog, so you really don’t question that, but you do stop at the color.

Now you have two opposing ideas in your head: “That’s a purple dog” and “Dogs are not purple.”

The term for this is cognitive dissonance—stuff just doesn’t add up based on what you know about the world. You need to reconcile those two opposing viewpoints. How do you go about doing that? In the curious case of the dog, explanations could include:

• “Somebody spray-painted that poor dog.”

• “I’m seeing things.”

• “Maybe there really are purple dogs...”

In the last example, you are considering whether to reconcile and expand your mental model for dogs to include their being purple.

This is what some people will refer to as a “teachable moment.” You get this nice element of friction that requires the learner to actively reconcile a disparate idea.

• Which ‘80s child star now has three wives?

• 8 reasons to avoid lip balm

• The surprising truth about fluorescent lights

I really don’t care about any of these things, yet I find myself strangely compelled to click on them (I actually made up that list, but you get the idea). Whoever writes headlines for the AOL home page is a genius at tweaking my curiosity. It’s shallow curiosity, but it still gets me to click on their link.

George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology, describes curiosity as “arising when attention becomes focused on a gap in one’s knowledge. Such information gaps produce the feeling of deprivation labeled curiosity. The curious individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to reduce or eliminate the feeling of deprivation.”

The elephant is a curious creature, and if you can incite that curiosity you can get a lot of attention from the elephant. So how do you make the elephant curious?

• Ask interesting questions. If the question you are asking can be answered using a simple online search, it’s not an interesting question. Interesting questions require your learner to interpret or apply the information, not just to recall it. Pure recall questions were never all that interesting, but in today’s current technology- and information-rich world, they are just a waste of time.

• Be mysterious. Can you set up a mystery that needs to be solved? Can you make use of clever reveals? Can you start a science class by asking “Why does Saturn have rings? And why don’t any of the other planets in our solar system have them?” (Cialdini 2005). How about starting a project-management class with a case study where the project failed spectacularly, and challenging the students to spot the reasons from the initial project documents? You can use a mystery as a framing device for instruction or as a puzzle for the students to solve.

• Leave stuff out. One of the ways the AOL headlines suck me in is by carefully leaving information out. It may turn out that the polygamist ‘80s child star is someone I barely remember from a show I never watched—or it might have been my absolute favorite actor from the show I watched religiously. The possibility is intriguing enough to pull me in. The reason I click is to close that knowledge gap.

This is a tough idea for learning designers, because it’s our job to make sure people have complete information and easy access to it. Leaving key information out is counterintuitive.

• Be less helpful. Dan Meyer, a math teacher and blogger (http://blog.mrmeyer.com), has a philosophy he describes as Be Less Helpful. I encourage you to check out his material for yourself, but my understanding of what he talks about is that we do our learners a disservice by making the problem too complete. By putting less information into the upfront presentation of the problem, we encourage our learners to work to fill in the gaps and learn strategies for approaching messy, ill-structured problems, instead of just learning how to plug the numbers into a formula. Framing and clarifying the problem becomes part of the learning experience.

In an experiment done by the MIT Media Lab (Okita 2008), people interacted with a virtual agent in a virtual reality environment. In one group, the test subjects believed they were interacting with another person in avatar form; in the other, the test subjects knew they were interacting with a computer in humanoid form. In both cases, the test subjects were interacting with the computer, which behaved identically in both conditions.

When people believed they were interacting with a live person, they showed more visible signs of paying attention, learned more, and did better on post-tests. The only variable was that the test subjects believed they were interacting with a real person. Again, we pay more attention when there are other people involved.

Social learning can take many forms. It can involve group projects or be less formal knowledge exchanges using social media. In traditional learning environments, the teacher was the source of all knowledge—information was essentially handed to the students—but today, students bring a lot of knowledge and experience to any learning circumstance, and it’s wasteful to not take advantage of that.

There are some specific ways to leverage social interaction to engage the elephant, including collaboration, competition, and social proof.

Collaborative learning has other benefits in addition to getting the elephant’s attention. For example, Philip Uri Treisman, of the University of California, Berkeley, tells a story about trying to improve the math performance of minority students (primarily black and Hispanic students). Treisman and his colleagues speculated about possible causes of low performance—maybe the students hadn’t had the same academic preparation at disadvantaged schools, or lacked good family support, or hadn’t learned good study habits.

But when they investigated by actually observing the students, they found that none of these assumptions were true. They found that the minority students studied diligently and had supportive environments.

The clue came when Treisman and his colleagues compared the minority students’ study habits to those of the much more academically successful Asian students. The main difference they found between the two populations was that the minority students studied alone and the Asian students studied together.

The Asian students studied in groups, helped each other with problems, acted as resources for each other, and interacted socially around the subject matter. The minority students typically worked very hard but worked alone, studying in isolation.

When Treisman and his colleagues created a structure to allow the minority students to work with each other, they became much more successful, equaling and frequently outperforming the rest of the students.

If learners can see that other learners are engaged with the material, or if a group of students know that previous classes performed well, they are more likely to engage and perform better themselves.

When I taught semester-long undergraduate classes, I would sometimes have students do class presentations throughout the semester. The tone and quality of the first few presentations would set the bar for the rest of the semester.

In an online learning environment, being able to see who else has taken a class or what their level of participation was can influence the behavior of subsequent students.

Competition is a social mechanism that equals instant urgency. Athletes who are about to compete start showing the physiological signs of arousal (increased heart rate, hormone release, skin reaction) before the physical part of the game even begins.

There’s no question that competition can be a useful way to get the elephant’s attention, but there are a number of problems with it as a learning strategy:

• Not everyone is competitive. Some people really enjoy competition, but some people really dislike it or find it stressful. While a little bit of tension can improve learning by focusing attention, a lot of stress will detract from the learning experience. Additionally, research suggests that it’s a bigger negative for students who don’t do well with competition than it is a positive for students who do respond well.

• Competition teaches learners how to win. Some people might say, “What’s wrong with teaching students how to win?” But a focus on winning can suck all the air out of the room. Basically, a focus on winning means learners are no longer focusing on the material. Winning becomes the main goal, not mastery of the material, or understanding, or how to use the material to accomplish things. All of those are relegated to the status of “things that will help me win” rather than being the goal itself. This is particularly problematic if the reward for winning is something extrinsic, like money or prizes.

• Competition as motivation isn’t a good long-term strategy. It suggests to learners that things that aren’t structured as a competition are less worthy of attention, and it devalues the subject matter.

Competition can grab the elephant’s attention, but it should be used sparingly, if at all. It’s probably fine to use a small competitive game to break up a learner experience for participants, but it shouldn’t ever be used as the primary method for motivating learners.

For example, we know (from earlier in this chapter) that this block of text isn’t very engaging:

When two vehicles reach an intersection at the same time, and all-way stop signs or flashing red traffic lights control the intersection, the driver on the left must yield right of way to the driver on the right. (Minnesota Driver’s Manual, p. 41)

It does get better when we use a visual:

If you’re looking for an even more dynamic example, think of car-racing video games. Video games are particularly masterful at creating visuals that attract (and possibly distract) the elephant.

There are several good resources on creating visuals. Robin Williams’s The Non-Designer’s Design Book and Connie Malamed’s Visual Design Solutions are particularly good. Those books can give you a lot of guidance for creating compelling visuals, but there are a few things you should keep in mind.

Know why you are adding a visual. Visuals can have a lot of different purposes in instructional material. It’s useful to know why are you adding a graphic. Some of the reasons to use visuals include:

• Decoration—Sometimes it’s just about making it pretty. Breaking up text or adding visual appeal both have their place. Don Norman’s book Emotional Design discusses research suggesting that attractive things work better than unattractive ones—possibly due to the positive reaction they bring out in users—and it can be useful to provide visual rests in lengthy text passages.

Despite that, decorative graphics are the shallowest type of instructional visual and should be used with some caution. There is research that suggests decorative graphics can distract learners from the main material (Thalheimer 2004).

Also, whenever possible, avoid visual clichés. We’ve all seen that generic “hand-shaking” stock art image too many times already.

• Progression—Sometimes visuals can be much more effective than a text-only explanation for showing a process or steps in a procedure. Visuals can be particularly useful in showing progression over time.

• Conceptual metaphorical—Visuals can help explain a concept or a metaphor in a way that description alone can’t. Infographics are specifically intended to make complicated information easier to process or understand.

Without a background in mathematics, data analysis, or similar fields that require spending lots of time with big numbers, most people have a hard time comprehending unfamiliar numeric-based data in any meaningful way. Visualization can help people understand how to process that information when they don’t already have a set of shelves in their mental model.

Visuals help distribute the load. Verbal and visual information seem to be processed differently by the brain, and as a result, effective use of both visual and verbal information helps keep learners from being overwhelmed by the material and gives them more ways to find the information again.

Anyone who’s read a typical textbook knows it’s got a lot more verbal information than visual information. To use our shelf metaphor, there’s a whole lot of capacity on the visual side of the shelf that isn’t being used. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, learning styles (e.g., visual, auditory, kinesthetic learners) aren’t very useful, and part of the reason is that everyone is a visual learner. Unless someone has a vision or related impairment, they learn from visuals, and if we aren’t taking advantage of that capacity, we are tying one hand behind our backs as learning designers.

Visuals can help build shelves. If your learners have small, general closets, and you have a lot of information to give them to put in those closets, visuals can be a good way to help them build a few shelves. Visual organizers can give learners a way to mentally parse the information they are receiving.

Visuals provide context. We’ve already talked about the critical importance of context, and visuals can provide a huge amount of context in a situation:

• Scenario context—You can spend a lot of time describing a scenario in words, or you can shortcut a lot of that wordiness using visuals. The setting where something takes place can provide a lot of information or triggers about a situation.

• Emotional context—Similarly, you can get a lot of emotional context from images. How much can you infer about each image below without having any words of explanation?

• Contextual triggers—One of the things we can do in a learning environment is to accustom our learners to certain behavior triggers.

For example, I’ve recently been involved with a project where we want to educate people about “vampire” energy use—energy drawn from items like electronic devices that are plugged in but not currently being used. If you leave a cellphone charging overnight, the charger continues to draw power after the phone is fully charged, wasting energy. We want the learner to associate the sight of a plugged-in cellphone with the idea of potential wasted energy and then, consequently, with the action of unplugging fully charged phones.

Creating the visual association between the trigger and the action is an important part of encouraging the memory and the behavior.

Using more fully tactile activities may help keep the monkey mind preoccupied, helping focus remain on the main task. For example, there is some research that suggests that doodling during a meeting or lecture can help people stay focused (Andrade 2009). Tactile activities that are directly related are presumably an even better option.

Things that you can taste, touch, hear, and smell also provide additional context that can act as memory triggers, and physical interaction can attract the elephant’s attention by providing a different way to interact with material.

If the topic you are teaching has a hands-on component, then the learning should too.

That said, if you are confident of your audience and confident that something is actually funny, then it can be used to good effect in engaging learners. Research studies have showed that students were better able to recall and complete funny sentences as opposed to neutral sentences, probably because the humor focuses learners’ attention or because the humorous versions were more memorable (Schmidt 1994).

If you are trying to use humor, it’s a really, really good idea to test it with your audience to make sure they agree with you about what’s funny.

Some people think there’s nothing funnier than a disgruntled kitten in a frog costume.

And some people really don’t.

But good use of rewards, like humor, can be a tricky business. At the most basic level, the idea is that if you reward a behavior, you increase the likelihood that behavior will occur, and if you punish a behavior, you decrease the likelihood that behavior will occur.

This can work if it’s applied well in the right circumstances, but frequently it’s not applied well.

Let’s say I want to learn financial literacy and investing for retirement, so I get a book on the topic. It tells me all sorts of useful things, but some of them I will have to wait until next quarter to implement (changing a payroll deduction), and some I won’t be able to use potentially for years (how to best distribute my IRA income after retirement). But there isn’t anything I can do with most of this information right now, which, as you might imagine, makes it a bit difficult to force myself to pay attention to it.

Compare that to learning about financial investing using a simulation game. You sit down, create an avatar, and start setting up your financial investment portfolio. You get to make decisions and play them through, skipping ahead years and decades at a time. You tweak and adjust your financial plan, and see how those decisions play out. You get to try completely different scenarios and see completely different outcomes.

The game scenario has a number of shiny advantages for attracting the elephant (feedback, risk, context, interesting and even fun challenges), but it also has the immediate rewards, punishments, and consequences that make it a compelling and “graspable” learning experience.

Don’t get me wrong; books can have rewards too—it’s not just the media that makes a difference. For an information junkie, the confirmations of already-gained knowledge and the new insights gained in books might provide a satisfying reward, but if you’re not intrinsically motivated by the topic, you might need more specific challenges to accomplish, and more concrete rewards, in order to succeed in learning.

In the simulation example, there’s something you can do immediately with the information you are learning. You don’t have to work nearly as hard to persuade the elephant to pay attention, because the problem and questions are immediate.

You could hand out extrinsic rewards like candy (“Finish this course and get a gift card!”), but that’s a shallow and ultimately ineffective way to motivate someone. It might work with pets, but it’s a bad method for people. I’ve started referring to this as “the gift card effect.” You know the drill—“We can’t actually compensate you appropriately for this, but if you do it anyway, you can enjoy the equivalent of three pricey Coffee Beverages on us instead!” As a gesture of appreciation after the fact, these cards are fine. As a way to incentivize or motivate behavior, they are at best silly and at worst counterproductive.

Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, did an experiment in which people were paid to make Lego shapes—a small sum for each shape they created. In one group, each Lego shape was displayed prominently when it was completed, and in the other each shape was broken back apart in front of the person and the pieces dumped back in the bins to be re-used (Ariely 2008).

Participants in the first group made significantly more shapes than people in the second, even though the financial rewards were exactly the same.

Similar effects are seen where people are asked to engage in an activity for the sake of that activity, rather than for financial payment or other extrinsic reward. Once you start paying people, it becomes work and can have a negative effect on performance and motivation. For example, kids who are rewarded for drawing pictures draw less than when it is a voluntary activity. It becomes work, or an obligation, when there’s compensation involved. The emphasis can very quickly shift from the activity to the rewards (Kohn 1993).

Two excellent books on this topic are Drive, by Daniel Pink, and Punished by Rewards, by Alfie Kohn.

The common thread of all successful intrinsic rewards is that they need to be genuinely useful or satisfying to the learner. For example, we already talked about organizing a learning experience around real achievements:

Photoshop for Beginners

• Lesson 1: How to create a swanky blog header

• Lesson 2: How to make a so-so photo look amazing

• Lesson 3: How to create an album cover

• Lesson 4: How to remove your ex from your sister’s wedding pictures

This learning experience has intrinsic rewards built right in, in the form of quantifiable and satisfying accomplishments. You can also consider how you would reward the different accomplishments. For example, you could give a big gold star and 1000 experience points to learners for each item they accomplish, but that’s a pretty extrinsic type of reward.

A better reward might be to create an online gallery where learners could display the results of their accomplishments. This form of reward would be much closer to the intrinsic nature of the task.

You don’t get to decide what’s intrinsic to the learner.

Any form of intrinsic reward has to be flexible and has to ensure that the learner has at least some control. If there aren’t options and autonomy for the learners, then you are just guessing what is meaningful to them. Sometimes you may guess right (and the likelihood of that goes up when you really know your learner well), but ultimately you want to give the learner as much control as possible in letting them decide what’s meaningful.

I’ve heard the argument that learners don’t know what they don’t know, and that they need guidance and directions. This can be a justification for less autonomy in an environment, but there are always ways to give options to even the most novice learners.

Some ways you can give learners autonomy:

• Let them help determine what’s learned.

• Let them choose where to start, or in what order to approach the material.

• Have them make decisions about what assignments or projects they do.

• Have them bring their own questions, projects, or problems to the table, and focus the learning experience around addressing or solving those challenges.

If you genuinely can’t give learners any autonomy, then stay away from any kind of rewards as a way to drive attention. There’s no such thing as mandatory fun, after all.

• Attracting attention is not the same thing as maintaining attention. Make sure the device you use to attract attention is intrinsic to the material being learned. If it’s not, it may actually be distracting and negatively impact learning.

• Attention is much easier for learners when they are going to be able to use the material right away. If possible, have the point of learning be close to the point of use (just-in-time learning). When that’s not possible, use scenarios or problem-solving to create the feeling of immediate usefulness.

• Some ways to attract your learners’ attention include stories, emotional resonance, urgency, surprise, and interesting puzzles.

• Social interaction and visual cues will go a long way to attracting and maintaining attention.

• Devices like competition and extrinsic rewards will attract your learners’ attention, but they will almost certainly distract them from the real goal and have a negative impact on their intrinsic motivation. They are best avoided unless used very carefully.

• Intrinsic rewards almost always require learner autonomy or choice to be effective.

Ariely, Dan, Emir Kamenica, and Dražen Prelec. 2008. “Man’s Search for Meaning: The Case of Legos.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 67: 671–677.

Bean, Cammy. 2011. “Avoiding the Trap of Clicky-Clicky Bling-Bling.” eLearn Magazine, June. http://elearnmag.acm.org/featured.cfm?aid=1999745.

Berns, Gregory S., Samuel M. Mcclure, and P. Read Montague. 2001. “Predictability Modulates Human Brain Response to Reward.” Journal of Neuroscience 21 (April).

Cialdini, Robert. 2005. “What’s the Best Secret Device for Engaging Student Interest? The Answer Is in the Title.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 24 (1): 22–29.

Deterding, Sebastian. 2011. “A Quick Buck by Copy and Paste,” posted by Gamification Research Network. http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/a-quick-buck-by-copy-and-paste.

Gailliot, M.T., R.F. Baumeister, C.N. DeWall, J.K. Maner, E.A. Plant, D.M. Tice, L.E. Brewer, and B.J. Schmeichel. 2007. “Self-Control Relies on Glucose as a Limited Energy Source: Willpower Is More Than a Metaphor.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92: 325–336.

Haidt, Jonathan. 2006. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Basic Books.

Jabr, Ferris. 2010. “The Psychology of Competition: Meeting Your Match.” Scientific American Mind Nov/Dec: 42–45.

Killeen, Peter R. 2013. “Absent Without Leave: A Neuroenergetic Theory of Mind Wandering.” Frontiers in Psychology. 4: 373.

Kohn, Alfie. 1993. Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Loewenstein, G. 1994. “The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation.” Psychological Bulletin 116(1): 75–98. Found via Stephen Anderson’s excellent article on Johnny Holland.

Mason, Charlotte. 1923. “Three Instruments of Education.” Charlotte Mason’s Original Homeschooling Series 6: 94. Copyrighted 2002–2003 by Ambleside Online.

Minnesota Driver’s Manual. www.dps.state.mn.us/dvs/DLTraining/DLManual/DLManual.htm.

Okita, S.Y., J. Bailenson, and D.L. Schwartz. 2008. “Mere Belief of Social Action Improves Complex Learning.” Proceedings of the 8th International Conference for the Learning Sciences.

Pink, Daniel. 2009. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverhead Books (Penguin).

Schmidt, S.R. 1994. “Effects of Humor on Sentence Memory.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 20: 953–967.

Shiv, B. and A. Fedorikhin. 1999. “Heart and Mind in Conflict: The Interplay of Affect and Cognition in Consumer Decision Making.” Journal of Consumer Research 26 (December): 278–282.

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Treisman, Philip Uri. 1990. “Academic Perestroika: Teaching, Learning, and the Faculty’s Role in Turbulent Times.” From an edited transcript of his lecture of the same name, delivered March 8, 1990, at California State University, San Bernardino. www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ope/fipse/perestroika.html.

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