CHAPTER 9

How Can You Guarantee Transfer of Learning to the Workplace?

Transfer of learning has long been a concern for professionals in the field of talent development. After all, we do not exist to merely “train”; we exist to improve performance in the workplace. How well learning is applied on the job is the ultimate goal.

In Telling Ain’t Training, Harold Stolovitch and Erica Keeps write:

I agree. However, not knowing the exact percentage isn’t a reason for you to throw in the towel. In research that I referenced in chapters 6 and 7, authors Salas et al. (2012) used meta-analysis to determine how to design and deliver training as effectively as possible. Their research is filled with valuable information for you. They state that, “The research on training clearly shows two things: (a) training works, and (b) the way training is designed, delivered, and implemented matters.”

This is good news! I’m sure you’ve heard the few detractors who would like us to believe that training doesn’t work. So it is good to read solid research stating unequivocally that it does work. It’s up to you to make sure you are doing everything necessary in your design and delivery to stand behind that claim. You need to ensure performance and the transfer of learning to the workplace.

Ensuring Performance and Transfer of Learning

A training program alone will not lead to long-lasting learning and change. What happens prior and follows after the training program ends are equally critical to success. What separates effective from ineffective training is the attention given to on-the-job application. Unfortunately the application is often the most neglected part of a training design. What do you do before, during, and after training are all equally important to ensure the learning is applied on the job. I have addressed each of these in other chapters about design and delivery. This summary incorporates what Salas and his colleagues (2012) address in their report.

Involve the Team Before the Training Occurs

Eduardo Salas and his colleagues (2012) summarize three steps to take before training: conduct a training needs analysis; prepare the learning climate; and prepare supervisors and leaders. Since I’ve already discussed the first two, I’ll focus on the third. Besides, “preparing supervisors and leaders” is probably the area most of us need to shore up.

Involve each participant’s team before the training session. Start by pretraining participants’ supervisors—this is especially important when the organization is going through a major change. When they receive such training, supervisors are able to serve not merely as managers but also as mentors, coaches, role models, and encouragers.

Of course, this step may initially be expensive, time-consuming, and hard to implement. This is an instance in which virtual training programs can be beneficial. If you cannot pretrain supervisors, you may want to brief them about the training their employees are receiving. In such briefings, it is important for you to discuss the following:

• the objectives of the training program

• the course outline

• the kinds of training activities utilized in the program

• course materials

• suggestions for facilitating further practice and application of skills.

But this pretraining meeting is not just for you to provide information, it is also about getting information. Meet with the participants’ managers to discuss what the manager expects from the workshop. Dana Robinson (2008) offers her suggestions on the type of questions you can ask when exploring a manager’s request for a training program:

• What are the goals for your employees?

• What are the measures you use to determine an employees’ success?

• What must employees do more, better, or differently if your department or function is to be effective?

• What have you observed employees do that needs to change?

This approach is valuable to build your training program with organizational objectives in mind. It helps managers and supervisors trust that learners will find a connection between their new skills and the organization’s goals and priorities.

Another way to make supervisors your allies is to enlist their cooperation with regard to any precourse preparation you may ask of their employees. Giving participants time from their regular responsibilities to read advance materials or complete precourse assignments is a real contribution. It is even better when supervisors sit down with their employees and help them define a personal case situation or two to bring to the training program. This can become the basis for real-life problem solving during the training session.

There are other things you can do prior to the training program to build supervisor support. Here are some ideas to get you thinking in that direction:

• Partner with supervisors to help them determine how they can help their employees upon returning from the workshop. Ask questions to determine the link between the workshop and the performance results. At the very least, leave them with a list of skills that you intend to discuss in the workshop. Managers can use this list to help reinforce these new skills when they see implementing them on the job, or as stated in the One Minute Manager, “catch them doing something right.”

• Inform participants’ managers about any action plan activities.

• Collect messages of support from participants’ managers describing how they will support transfer of the skills after the workshop. Weave these messages into your workshop.

• Ask participants to bring challenges they have that they hope will be resolved by what they learn.

• Ask participants and their supervisors to select a project to undertake as a result of what the participants learn. If you do this for a virtual training session, be very clear in your written directions and offer assistance and clarification by phone or email. When participants come to the training program with a project that has already been discussed with their management or team, on-the-job application is built into the program design.

Of course, the best way to obtain management support is to invite supervisors to conduct training programs for their own team. While once uncommon, this is occurring more frequently. Fei Liu has worked for COFCO in China for 12 years and states that the company is very successful using this technique. Participants report that manager-led training is successful as long as managers are well prepared to conduct training on their own (Biech 2015). In many instances, you may be asked to help managers prepare.

Support During the Training Program

Salas’s research demonstrates that during training you should enable the right mindset and follow appropriate instructional principles, such as building in engagement opportunities and using computer-based training correctly. I’ve discussed most of this in chapters 6, 7, and 8, so here’s a summary of ideas you can facilitate to ensure application:

• Allow enough practice time for skill mastery. Some trainers have a tendency to move quickly from skill to skill without enough rehearsal. For example, you can give participants the opportunity to role-play a skill and have peers provide feedback on their performance. Some degree of overlearning is required for participants to feel confident about exercising a new skill. Confidence grows even more when participants master exercises of increasing levels of difficulty. Eventually, they believe that they truly own the skill.

• Use realistic practice. The more similar the training situation is to the situation on the job, the more likely it is to last. Even re-creating the physical environment of the job can be helpful. For example, call center training is greatly enhanced if recordings of actual customer calls are used and the training takes place in an actual call center.

• Share successes. Tell participants how past training sessions have had a positive impact in the workplace.

• Read messages of support from key people from the organization. If you are an internal facilitator or working with just one organization, you might include statements from participants’ line managers describing how they will support transfer after the workshop.

• Remember to use the debriefing questions. It is only a start to learning when participants hear the “what” of your message. The most important part comes with the debriefing questions or the “so what” (so what does that mean or relate?) and the “now what” (now what are you going to do or change or implement as a result?). This reduces the gap between talking and action, and forces the learning to be focused on implementation.

• Build in a final module that addresses what they will do. It may be in the form of an action plan or how to develop yourself. Once learners leave the training session they need to continue to learn.

• Provide participants with a range of strategies for how to continue to learn.

• During the workshop learn when participants will have an opportunity to implement what they are learning. Tell them that they should watch for follow-up reminders when the event occurs. Prepare your follow up so it is ready to send just in time. For example, just prior to performance reviews, email your participants reminders about how to conduct successful reviews.

• Encourage participants to express their opinions about the skills being taught and how they performed. They are less likely to resist changes if they have the chance to express their reservations and trepidations. Some trainers hard-sell the value of the skills, ideas, and procedures they are advocating. But, it’s far better to encourage participants to draw their own conclusions. For example, invite participants to examine their thoughts about the skills they are learning and the environment they will practice them in. Ask the rest of the class to take turns listening, observing, and communicating their own perceptions.

• If you are able to arrange for time back on the job between training sessions, give participants assignments to complete in their own work settings. When you resume the training, you can ask them to share how well the real-life practice went, and pose any questions they may still have about their new skills.

At the Close of the Training

Many things come together at the end of your training. Allow enough time to discuss next steps. This is not the time to rush participants through an evaluation form and push them out the door. Instead use the closing of your training program to help ensure transfer of learning. The following list contains options that will work for both traditional and virtual training sessions.

At the end of the training session you could:

• Ask participants to assess themselves and identify a “buddy” in the session who could help coach them or encourage them to practice specific skills.

• Provide job aids.

• Ask participants to voluntarily opt into a continuing learning group. Create a wiki or a LinkedIn page where they can ask questions, share tips, give advice, or celebrate successes. You can seed the site with questions, links to videos, or short articles.

• Ask participants to commit to trying one new skill within the week. If it was a supervisory skills training, perhaps they could meet with one of their employees to conduct a developmental discussion. Ask them to publicly commit to their plans and have them text the entire group once they complete their actions.

• Plan at least an hour for participants to brainstorm a list of barriers they anticipate that may prevent them from implementing some of the skills that were discussed in the workshop. Form small groups to tackle each of the barriers and report out ideas to overcome them. Do the group a favor and compile the lists and email them to the group shortly after the session.

• Suggest that participants discuss their action plans with their managers upon returning, and ask for support in achieving their goals.

• Organize peer practice groups to support one another as they perfect their skills and competencies. They may be self-organizing or you may wish to attend the first meeting to get them started and provide resources and a suggested meeting format to ensure the peer groups are productive.

• Near the end of the workshop ask each participant to partner with an individual with whom he has worked closely (and ideally is in the same physical location). Call these pairs support buddies, accountability partners, peer coaches, or peer mentors, depending on your audience. Ask them to select one topic from the training session that they want to focus on in the coming month. Then have each partner interview the other about strategies he will use to implement that topic daily at work (and at home if applicable) for the next 30 days. Have the partners schedule four weekly meetings over the coming month.

• At the close of the workshop, provide participants with a postcard and ask them to address it to themselves. Have participants write two MVTs (most valuable tips) and two things they intend to implement from the workshop. Tell the participants to select a learning accountability partner to contact and debrief upon receipt of the postcard. Mail the postcards out to arrive two to four weeks after the workshop.

Follow Up After the Training Session

After training, Eduardo Salas and his research team (2012) recommend that trainers remove obstacles to transfer; provide tools and advice to supervisors; encourage use of real-world debriefs; and provide reinforcement and support mechanisms. According to Cal Wick (2010), a few enlightened organizations have begun to recognize that making time for ongoing support results in more learning implemented back on the job. While many trainers deliver back-to-back learning sessions without time for follow up, the responsibility for follow up can be shared between the trainers and managers. Here are a few suggestions:

• Follow up the session by emailing a resource to participants. It could be something that came up during the session, an article you think will be pertinent, or a link to a YouTube presentation.

• Follow up the session with a quiz. Share responses with everyone and offer prizes for the best ones.

• About a week after the session, tweet a simple question that participants can respond to. For example you could ask what new skill they have tried and to give themselves a score of how successful they were. You could use a 100 percent scale or an A, B, C, D, F scale. Follow up to find out what you can do to help.

• Several months after the workshop, invite the participants to return for a review and celebration session during which they share their successes and review situations they needed additional knowledge or skills to complete.

• Facilitate a book club that meets over lunch once or twice each month to continue learning about your topic. You could also create a discussion forum or arrange a webinar or conference call for the discussion.

• Create short videos or a podcast about some of the topics presented in the workshop, and then send the link to participants. Interviews are a great and easy way to do this.

• Reinforce the content using workplace communication processes. Use the workplace employee newsletter, intranet, or posters to reinforce key training concepts. Provide tips, funny self-assessments, and other means for your employees to apply and refine what they’ve learned.

Transfer of learning to the workplace often requires that you follow up with participants as either a mentor or a coach. Mentoring and coaching are effective ways to ensure the development needs are transferred. Training sessions that are followed up with on-the-job support result in a higher return on every dollar invested.

 

 

On-the-Job Support Ensures Transfer

Most organizations expect their managers to develop people. However, few clearly specify people development as a key item on their performance review forms. Organizations that are clear about this responsibility also generally link the performance management system with talent development, as well as the compensation and benefits package. Most organizations and managers believe that talent development should be linked to managers’ promotion and performance evaluation. They just have not taken the time to do so. I anticipate this changing rapidly in the near future.

One of the new roles for trainers is to have solid coaching and mentoring skills so that they can support managers and supervisors in their new “coaching” roles. In these instances they will act in two roles. They will be a coach to the managers and they will help managers learn to be good coaches to their direct reports.

Engaging Leaders in Development and Performance

The next training event is a perfect time to begin practicing your new role. Your responsibility to your organization is to ensure transfer of learning back to the workplace. But it doesn’t end there.

You can’t be on the job with your learners all the time, so for on-the-job support to occur, the supervisor needs to be involved. Here are a few things you can do in your new role as a coach to the supervisors:

• Suggest that the supervisors find other ways for the learner to practice the skills. Serving on an internal cross-functional team or in a volunteer activity are helpful because they allow the learners to experiment with their new skills. Make sure managers meet regularly with their learners to provide coaching along the way.

• Familiarize supervisors with the skills taught in the session so they can correct or reinforce any behaviors they observe.

• Recommend that supervisors ask participants to review key concepts learned in training with others in their position once they return to the workplace.

• Suggest that supervisors discuss any problems in transferring skills and knowledge from the workshop to the job. Tell them to ask what barriers need to be removed to allow the learner to practice new skills.

Competency Is Nothing Without Commitment and Confidence

As a trainer you may think that your key role is to provide competence and expertise. You are expected to facilitate a process so that learners acquire new knowledge and behaviors as a result of practice and the content you provide. In fact, isn’t that the purpose of writing objectives and incorporating KSAs (knowledge, skills, attitude)? Actually, it’s only a portion.

Your learners can leave your training event with perfect scores in the content you have delivered. Common sense, however, tells us that for your learners to implement the acquired skills and knowledge on the job, they have to be committed to the change and confident in themselves to take the first steps to try out the skills.

Your job is to ensure your learners have not only the competence, but also the confidence and commitment to make the change and apply what they learned in the workplace. How does that happen? You already know how to facilitate competence, and I have presented ways to encourage confidence and commitment. Your learners gain confidence when they receive feedback from you, practice the skills, role play, or work in small groups to experiment with the skills. They gain commitment when they complete an action plan, resolve a case study, commit to a change to the rest of the group, or have a chance to ask questions about or discuss their concerns.

Performing Under Pressure

Some jobs require you to perform under duress. Trainers have long believed that it was not possible to train individuals to react under pressure. Is it possible to ensure that learners do not freeze when confronted with a stressful situation and remember to apply what they’ve learned? Can you train them to perform under pressure? Recent research confirms it is possible.

People freeze in high-stress situations because their working memory becomes overwhelmed by the emotional reaction. Your brain is built for immediate responses when threatened and as a result your body automatically releases adrenaline and cortisol. These emotions overwhelm what you’ve learned for how to deal with these situations. For a long time trainers believed there wasn’t much they could change. However, a recent study demonstrates that learners can be trained to control their emotions under stress, which means they’ll be able to utilize what they learned to perform under pressure (Schweizer et al. 2013).

Researchers in the study conducted a series of experiments with two subject groups. The first was trained using emotionally neutral material to match geometric shapes. The second group was given emotionally loaded tasks, including matching words such as evil and dissent to pictures of facial expressions.

After training, the subjects viewed highly emotional videos; for example, news coverage of natural disasters. They were asked to regulate their emotions, stay calm, and emotionally detach while watching. Using brain scans and self-reporting, the team found that those who had trained with the emotional content were better able to regulate their emotions (Schweizer et al. 2013).

What does this tell us as trainers? If you want to help people perform better under stress, train them under stress. Make training challenging. Emotional working memory improves when it’s operating at capacity. Don’t make training too easy or learners won’t experience the stress that occurs in real-life situations. Add emotional content to role plays. Ask learners to identify their emotions as they progress through a role-play exercise or hypothetical situation.

Is Learning Transfer About Recall and Retention?

Let’s think about this. No single area of your brain is completely responsible for memory. Memories are spread out and generated from throughout the brain (Jensen 2008). Our brain is complex, and retention starts with the messages that grab our attention based on memories, level of interest, and awareness (Medina 2008).

Retention depends on how well our brain processes, stores, and retrieves the information. Hundreds of things affect how we gain and retain information, and there are a few things to focus on regarding retention (Jensen 2008; Medina 2008):

• Patterns. Our brain looks for patterns based on prior experiences to fill in the blanks. If the pattern is clearly defined, content can be readily retrieved. How much background information we have affects how readily our brain takes in new information and places it in the pattern.

• Forgetting. German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus showed that a great deal of memory loss occurs in the first hour or two of initial exposure. He most likely created “forgetting curves” so that we wouldn’t forget (Loftus 1985; Schacter 2011).

• Repetition. Ebbinghaus also demonstrated the power of repetition to move content from short-term to long-term memory (Loftus 1985).

• Novelty. Repetition is critical, but the brain really craves novelty, which causes the dopamine system to send the chemical throughout the brain (Barcroft and Sommers 2005; Quilici and Mayer 1996; Rost and McMurray 2009).

• Basics. Sleep, exercise, rest, and food all affect how well our brain works and play a role in retention (Jensen 2008; Medina 2008).

• Spacing. Learning that is spaced over time with intervals between allow us to internalize and process new information to ensure that it moves into our long-term memory. Darryl Bruce and Harry Bahrick (1992) reviewed more than 300 studies, demonstrating the potency of spacing.

• Emotions and stress. Creating emotional arousal and a limited amount of stress all aid in retaining memories (Jensen 2008).

• Tools. Mnemonic devices are like job aids for our brains. They help us remember because they take a large amount of information and put it into a single chunk (Stolovitch and Keeps 2011). For example, you remember the colors of the spectrum using the acronym ROY G. BIV: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.

• Cognitive load. Your brain can only process a specific amount of information at a time. Don’t overload it (Ericson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer 1993; Medina 2008).

• Use it or lose it. Your brain generates more cells than it needs, and only those that receive chemical stimuli survive. Information that isn’t used is lost as the neural pathways weaken over time (Diamond 1996).

What about the social aspects of recall? Isn’t readiness to learn a critical element? While there are other aspects of learning that affect retention, you can see that these encompass many important aspects of the transfer of learning. They’re all useful. What I want you to take away from this section is that even if you facilitate the best training ever and attend to all the necessary cognitive steps, transfer of learning is dependent upon what happens before training, what happens after training, and the involvement of the learner’s immediate team.

I opened this chapter with the lament from Stolovitch and Keeps that we can’t really measure how much gets transferred. But there are other opinions too. Some theorists argue that transfer doesn’t occur at all. They believe that transfer is a passive notion and that participants actively transform what they have learned into a new context, constructing knowledge so that they understand it themselves (Larsen-Freeman 2013). They believe that learners change the information they have learned so that it makes sense to them. In addition, if the learner does not find the information necessary, it isn’t likely that the knowledge will ever transfer. Well, that makes sense to those of us who are trainers too!

Can Learning Transfer Be Predicted?

Precise measures of learning transfer are nearly impossible to find. Whether you call it transfer or not, it is a key step in improving performance in the workplace. Therefore, it would be nice to be able to predict the chances of success. Ensuring learning transfer is one of the most critical challenges facing our profession today. Twenty-five years of research by Rob Brinkerhoff (2006), an internationally recognized expert on training effectiveness and evaluation, demonstrates that the best predictor of learning transfer is “expectation.” If learners expect to be held accountable for using what they learned, they are more likely to transfer their skills and knowledge to the workplace. Most often this expectation of accountability is based on interactions with the learners’ managers.

Can leaders be trained to be better coaches? Research says they can be taught and also demonstrates the importance of why effective developmental discussions between supervisors and their employees are so critical (Zsambok et al. 1997; Eddy et al. 2006). When supervisors have developmental discussions, coach employees, and support employees as they implement new skills, it clearly enhances the predictability of learning transfer and retention. I see this nuance as a part of talent development’s changing role. We must help our organizations identify the tools, training, and support to help supervisors coach employees and use on-the-job assignments to reinforce training and to enable employees to continue their development.

Brinkerhoff’s conclusion is a valuable scientific nugget we must keep in mind. We have to make sure that time is available for the learners, their managers, and ourselves to create the expectation of accountability. After all, it’s what happens before and after the training that is the most important to ensure learning transfer. We must be more involved in the solution. We must make the time.

What We Know for Sure

Science tells us that we can rely on several proven facts:

• Transfer of learning and improved performance demonstrates training success.

• What you do before and after a training event is equally important for transfer of learning as what you do while training.

• Transfer of learning is enhanced when you conduct a training needs analysis, prepare the learning climate, and prepare supervisors and leaders prior to the training event.

• Few organizations recognize the value of making time for ongoing support before and after a training session.

• Transfer of learning is rarely about retention and recall.

• You can train people to respond well and recall learning in emotionally charged or stressful situations.

The Art Part

Your success will depend upon how well you adapt to the situation and your learners’ needs. Tap into some of these ideas to help your learners grow, to develop yourself, and to add your personal creative touch.

Where’s the money? Perhaps it’s time for you to consider reviewing how your organization invests training and development dollars and whether every delivery option will lead to transfer of learning.

Skill or will? Trainers sometimes discuss whether it is the learner’s skill or will that prevents top-notch performance following a training session. This refers to the fact that an employee may have learned the skill but is unwilling to use it. Therefore, the real reason an employee may not be using what was learned may not be skill-based at all. Identify ways you can inspire employees to stay motivated to use what they’ve learned.

Read it yourself. Download “The Science of Training and Development in Organizations: What Matters in Practice” by Salas and his colleagues, which is listed in the resource section for this chapter. You will appreciate the confirmation of best practices.

Pick an idea. This chapter shared dozens of ideas for how to encourage transfer of learning. They may not all work in your situation, but many will. Select one from each category—before, during, at the close, and after the training—to implement in your next workshop.

Add emotion. Don’t be afraid to add an emotional twist to learning to make it as much like real life as possible. Try adding deadlines to create a scenario similar to the workplace; for example, you could:

• Use a ticking clock during timed quizzes or exercises.

• Ask learners to brainstorm as many ideas as possible in two minutes.

• Ask salespeople to discuss how they feel when they’re trying to close a high-stakes deal.

Art and Science Questions You Might Ask

These questions provide potential challenges for your personal growth and development:

• What are you doing to ensure learning transfers to the workplace?

• How are you getting supervisors and managers involved to ensure you are providing accurate and required content for learners?

• What are you doing before and after training to ensure that learners can and will use what they learned in the workplace?

• How clear are you about required competencies and performance on the job?

• What evidence do you see that training is making an impact in the workplace?

• What role do you play in ensuring that you have created a learning environment?

• How can you make your organization more conducive to learning?

How Can You Guarantee Transfer of Learning to the Workplace?

Can you guarantee transfer of learning? Well, guarantee is a very specific word and you probably can’t guarantee it—but you can come pretty darn close. It all depends on what you do before, during, and after the training session. Training produces value when it is applied to your organization’s work. A critical part of your job is to ensure that participants transfer what they have learned from classroom to the job.

Yes, this means going the extra mile to help supervisors and managers better understand their role in developing employees. It’s our responsibility to see that this happens. Our focus needs to change to ensure our organizations are building a culture of learning. The ATD research report Building a Culture of Learning: The Foundation of a Successful Organization states that, “Robust cultures of learning are distinct hallmarks of organizations that consistently produce the best business results” (ATD 2016). Isn’t that what we all want for our organizations?

Transfer of learning is not an event. Like change, it is a process. And it is a critical part of having a culture of learning.

Resources

ATD. 2016. Building a Culture of Learning: The Foundation of a Successful Organization. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.

Barcroft, J., and M.S. Sommers. 2005. “Effects of Acoustic Variability on Second Language Vocabulary Learning.” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 27(3):387-414.

Biech, E. 2014. ASTD Handbook: The Definitive Reference for Training and Development. 2nd ed. Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press.

———. 2015a. Training and Development for Dummies. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

———. 2015b. Training Is the Answer: Making Learning and Development Work in China. Fairfax, VA: Trainers Publishing House.

Brinkerhoff, R. 2006. Telling Training’s Story. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

Bruce, D., and H.P. Bahrick. 1992. “Perceptions of Past Research.” American Psychologist 47(5):674.

Clark, R. 2015. Evidence-Based Training Methods: A Guide for Training Professionals. 2nd ed. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.

Diamond, M. 1996. “The Brain … Use It or Lose It.” Johns Hopkins School of Education. http://education.jhu.edu/PD/newhorizons/Neurosciences/articles/The%20Brain...Use%20it%20or%20Lose%20It.

Eddy, E.R., C.P. D’Abate, S.I. Tannenbaum, S. Givens-Skeaton, and G. Robinson. 2006. “Key Characteristics of Effective and Ineffective Developmental Interactions.” Human Resource Development Quarterly 17:59-84.

Ericson, K., R. Krampe, and C. Tesch-Romer. 1993. “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.” Psychological Review 100(3):363-406.

Jensen, E. 2008. Brain-Based Learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Knowles, M.S. III, E. Holton, and R. Swanson. 2015. The Adult Learner: The Definitive Classic in Adult Education and Human Resource Development. 8th ed. Burlington, MA: Elsevier/Butterworth-Heinemann.

Larsen-Freeman, D. 2013. “Transfer of Learning Transformed.” Language Learning: A Journal of Research in Language Studies, 63:S1. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9922.2012.00740.x/abstract.

Levin, H. 1996. Innovations in Learning: New Environments for Education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Loftus, G.R. 1985. “Evaluating Forgetting Curves.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 11(2):397-406. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.11.2.397.

Lombardo, M., and R. Eichinger. 2011. The Leadership Machine: Architecture to Develop Leaders for Any Future. Minneapolis: Lominger International: A Korn/Ferry Company.

Medina, J. 2008. Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Seattle: Pear Press.

Pluth, B. 2016. Creative Training: A Train-the-Trainer Field Guide. Eden Prairie, MN: Creative Training Productions.

Quilici, J.L., and R. Mayer. 1996. “Role of Examples in How Students Learn to Categorize Statistics Word Problems.” Journal of Educational Psychology 88(1):144-161.

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Rost, G.C., and B. McMurray. 2009. “Speaker Variability Augments Phonological Processing in Warly Word Learning.” Developmental Science 12(2):339-349.

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Silberman, M., and E. Biech. 2015. Active Training: A Handbook of Techniques, Designs, Case Examples, and Tips. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Stolovitch, H., and E. Keeps. 2011. Telling Ain’t Training. 2nd ed. Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press.

Wick, C., R. Pollock, and A. Jefferson. 2010. The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning: How to Turn Training and Development Into Business Results. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.

Zsambok, C.E., G.L. Kaempf, B. Crandall, M. Kyne, and Klein Associates Inc. 1997. “A Comprehensive Program to Deliver On-the-Job Training (OJT).” (ARI Contractor Report 97–18). Alexandria, VA: U.S. Army Research Institute (DTIC: ADA327576).