What Motivates Learners

For any training programme to be successful, learner motivation is an absolute must. So, what are the training characteristics that motivate learners?

Edmund Saas, a professor of education, has some answers.

In the late 1980s, Edmund conducted a study to determine student perceptions of those college classes likely to result in high and low classroom motivation. Edmund surveyed about 700 of his educational psychology students for the study.

The results of the study are discussed in Motivation in the College Classroom: What Students Tell Us, an article in the Teaching of Psychology journal (subscription required).

The following eight characteristics emerged as the top contributors to learner motivation (in order of importance):

   1. Instructor's enthusiasm
   2. Relevance of the material
   3. Organisation of the course
   4. Appropriate difficulty level of the material
   5. Active involvement of learners
   6. Variety of instructional methods
   7. Rapport between instructor and learners
   8. Use of appropriate examples

The first three characteristics had considerably higher ratings than the rest of the characteristics.

The top characteristics that students perceived as non-motivating were expectedly the opposite of the motivating characteristics:

   1. Lack of variety in instructional methods
   2. Disorganisation of the course
   3. Little or no active learner involvement
   4. Lack of involvement of the instructor
   5. Lack of interpersonal warmth from the instructor

If you want further descriptions of the motivating characteristics, see David Gershaw’s article titled Motivating Students to Learn.

How Much PowerPoint?

Today, PowerPoint appears to be omnipresent in every instructor-led training programme. But, is it too omnipresent? Omnipresent to the extent that it actually hinders learning?

Perhaps.

But how does one measure the omnipresence of PowerPoint? Based on the number of PowerPoint slides used?

Yes, that is one parameter we could look at. So the question is: what’s the maximum number of slides one should use for an hour of effective training?

There seems to be no clear answer to the question. I believe no significant research has happened in this area.

However, we do have a few pointers that give us some hints. Though the available pointers or guidelines relate to presentations rather than training, I believe we could extrapolate the guidelines to training too.

Guy Kawasaki, the venture capitalist, is often quoted on his 10/20/30 rule for presentations: a PowerPoint presentation should have 10 slides, last no more than 20 minutes, and contain no font smaller than 30 points.

Of course, Guy is mostly referring to presentations about raising capital, making a sale, and so on. And, he’s talking about short and crisp presentations.

Training presentations could be considerably longer than just a few minutes. But, as the presentation time increases, the relative number of slides should decrease. So, I don't think Guy would recommend having 30 slides in a presentation of one hour. Those are far too many slides.

Jeff Taylor, the founder of monster.com, is reported to use 11 slides for an hour of presentation. John Chen, the CEO of Sybase, is said to use 15 slides in an hour. Tony Robbins, the motivational guru, apparently uses just 5 slides in two hours!

FKA (Learning and Performance consultants), in one of their newsletters, says that their research suggests using a maximum of 12 slides for an hour of effective training.

Guila Muir, a train-the-trainer specialist, has a far more extreme rule of thumb:

• For a 30-minute presentation, use 1-2 slides
• For an hour’s presentation, use a maximum of 4 slides
• For an all-day training session, use a maximum of 8 slides

When I posed the question to Saul Carliner (prolific researcher, author, and e-learning expert), he offered the following advice:

• For a presentation of less than 10 minutes, use 1 slide per minute
• For a presentation of 11-30 minutes, use 1 slide per 2 minutes
• For a presentation of 31-90 minutes, use 1 slide per 3 minutes (or 20 slides per hour)
• For a presentation longer than 90 minutes, use 1 slide per 5 minutes (or 12 slides per hour)

Assuming that most training sessions last for more than an hour, the guideline that emerges suggests having about 5-12 slides per hour of training.

Would you agree?

Useful Instructional Methods

Many instructor-led technical training programmes appear to suffer from the “death by PowerPoint” syndrome. In many cases, the instructor is reduced to a reader of PowerPoint slides rather than being a facilitator for learning. Needless to say, the training programmes are not as effective as they should be.

To improve the efficacy of training programmes, curriculum designers must consider a variety of instructional methods or tactics for delivering specific chunks of content. (The specific instructional method you choose depends on a few factors: the kind of content, the number of students in the class, the time at your disposal, and so on. But, that's a topic for another time.)

The results from a study conducted by Darryl Sink (Darryl L. Sink & Associates, Inc) suggest some useful instructional methods. In the study, Darryl and a group of training professionals evaluated a list of instructional methods in relation to learning domains, number of students, and desired outcomes. The following is their list of the 16 most useful instructional methods rated on a 5-point scale.

Instructional Method	Score
Game	4.01
Role Play	3.91
Problem Solving/Lab	3.83
Simulation	3.82
Project	3.78
Guided Lab	3.73
Field Trip	3.70
Team Project	3.69
Lab	3.67
Discovery, Group	3.65
Cooperative Group Learning	3.58
Think Tank/Brainstorm	3.57
Apprenticeship	3.51
Seminar	3.46
Demonstration	3.46
Case Study	3.45

A higher score means that the instructional method is more useful under more conditions than the instructional method with a lower score. Click Descriptions of Key Instructional Methods for descriptions of the above methods and others.

Of course, you and I may rank these instructional methods a little differently based on our own experiences. But that doesn't take anything away from Darryl's study. It will definitely help to have the results of the study by your side at your design desk.