Your employees are bored of traditional leadership training programmes.
Frustrated by the encyclopaedic onslaught of different learning materials filled with little substance.
Without an engaging way to nurture your leadership pipeline, your company will continue to struggle developing people to successfully lead your organisation.
Read these three scientific studies that explain the power of bitesize learning and how it’s vital to corporate learning.
What is bitesize learning and how does it compare to traditional learning?
Also known as microlearning, bitesize learning programmes deliver learner-centric educational content in short chunks. Like a 30 second video clip or a one-page document. Impactful and easily digestible, bitesize learning gives people more control over how they learn.
By contrast, traditional learning methods require people to learn new behaviours and skills through rigid, linear, and comprehensive lessons with little-to-no breaks in-between. If you’ve ever sat through a 2-hour university lecture or company workshop, you’ll know how easy it is to switch off after the first 15 mins.
Spacing out training sessions improves people’s performance
Think about the day-long conferences or the huge textbook filled with opaque, technical language that you must study for certification exams. They rely on learners being able to absorb a wealth of information at one time.
In 1999, researchers John J. Donovan and David J. Radosevich showed that breaking lessons into modules and giving participants regular breaks in-between increases their ability to gain new skills.[1]
After analysing 63 studies, they found that people who had learned a skill or knowledge in sessions that included rest intervals, performed substantially better than those without.
Also, for more complex tasks, learners benefited with longer rest periods, while sessions teaching simple tasks only needed brief rest breaks.
So when setting up your leadership development training, ensure people are given enough time to digest and practice their new behaviours.
Breaking learning into chunks improves perception and memory
Ever watched a two-hour long movie for the second time and suddenly noticed important details that you never recognised in your first watch?
The brain struggles to process excessive amounts of new information quickly and efficiently, especially after only one encounter.
In 1956, researcher George Miller popularised ‘chunking’ – an information-processing mechanism that converts our information and experiences into small chunks, allowing for us to retrieve our memories quicker.[2]
Miller added that the brain has a limited capacity of information it can absorb, and chunking makes learning more digestible for the brain to process.
Chunking has influenced artificial intelligence, chess games for the simulation of chess expertise and child-directed speech for the simulation of children’s development of language.
Today, we’re all bombarded with information. Five to 15-minute long, attention-grabbing training sessions cut through the endless distractions and busy schedules by giving people the crucial information they need, when they’re most engaged.
‘How To’ content is powerful bitesize learning
Many people learn best from seeing how it’s done by others, and when this is combined with bitesize learning, it is powerful.
Researchers at University Hospital LMU Munich in Germany found their medical students retained practical knowledge for far longer when they learnt through bitesize ‘how to’ content rather than lectures.
During the 15-minute training sessions, one group observed a video recording of a medical care team using a specific tool, and the other group watched a videotaped lecture on the same topic.
The students who watched the instructional video knew significantly more of the training content during the simulation and demonstrated better retention two weeks later.[3]
These are just three studies we’ve selected from a plethora of available research proving the benefits of bitesize learning, and how it can improve your leadership development programmes.
For more information on how to use bitesize learning at your company speak to one of our experts.
References
- John J. Donovan and David J. Radosevich, “A Meta-Analytic Review of the Distribution of Practice Effect: Now You See It, Now You Don't.,” Journal of Applied Psychology 84, no. 5 (1999): pp. 795-805, https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.84.5.795.
- Fernand Gobet, “Chunking Models of Expertise: Implications for Education,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 19, no. 2 (2005): pp. 183-204, https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1110.
- Benedict Gross et al., “Microlearning for Patient Safety: Crew Resource Management Training in 15-Minutes,” PLOS ONE 14, no. 3 (July 2019), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0213178.
