Auditory Worked Examples

 In supporting Sales Teams, I’ve known that providing video or audio can have more impact than what a strict method/mode analysis suggests. While “time, motion and interpersonal interaction” does call for video, sales was served by video outside of customer demos  I wasn’t sure of the andragogy of it, but nobody besides myself cared  

Leaders have similar needs, and I recently had a need to really think through purpose and theory to draw a ring around the content that Learning Architects “should be” responsible for in my current role vs. the things I can do, but shouldn’t be considered part of my Body of Work. 

I ran across this: “Worked examples are useful in the initial acquisition of cognitive skills because they allow students to understand principles and their applications more deeply before applying them on their own (Renkl, 2014b). Worked examples have shown to be particularly effective for novice learners, who may experience high levels of cognitive load when learning new concepts and procedures simultaneously (Renkl, 2014a). In fact, worked examples tend to be more efficient and effective for initial skill acquisition compared to problem solving (Renkl, 2014a). If designed well, worked examples can provide models for learners to follow when tackling similar problems, allowing them to transfer knowledge from one task to another.”

I always thought of “worked examples” as math problems, completed templates or forms … things like that. But professions such as sales or leaders work primarily in verbal communication. So *hearing* a policy demonstrates how to communicate it effectively using the same encoding as the final work product.

We could argue that this is simply considering application context, which definitely one of the reasons why “worked examples” are so effective in reducing cognitive load in verbal work product  

However, auditory worked examples offer value beyond this. For example, they effectively demonstrate an “expert” treatment of the communication, allowing learners to self-evaluate the way they frame the message against a “correct” example - one of the meta cognitive tasks required to build the mental models needed for knowledge transfer.

Thinking this through allows a more targeted training approach than “do a video for salespeople”.

https://tll.mit.edu/teaching-resources/how-people-learn/worked-examples/#:~:text=Worked%20examples%20are%20step%2Dby,the%20problem%2C%20and%20the%20solution](https://tll.mit.edu/teaching-resources/how-people-learn/worked-examples/#:%7E:text=Worked%20examples%20are%20step%2Dby,the%20problem%2C%20and%20the%20solution