Based off of the article: Boost Basic Job Skills Training
Zealic's Cliff Notes
The Association for Talent Development doesn't just host great conferences, they also release awesome articles. Gamification is a great way to teach people new things; From basic training to more complicated and faceted areas.
Why should gamification be appealing to training and development professionals?
Everyone Loves Games
67 percent of American households play computer or video games. According to the Entertainment Software Rating Board, 26 percent of those are older than 50 years old, but it's the 74 percent younger than 50.
Gamification improves engagement
People readily embrace gamification because it's fun, it's less stressful and it creates less resistance to learning than traditional learning methods.
Gamification enhances traditional training techniques
Gamification has shown that it is helpful in improving learning retention with methods such as association, repetition, and elaboration. It's also good at increasing behavior-based learning.
Gamified learning is good for a diverse workforce
It allows you to facilitate learning that appeals to everyone and accommodate various groups (cultural, different languages and different generations).
Gamification is becoming commonplace
Gamification can easily be integrated into existing training environments and can be implemented in many different platforms (customer loyalty, employee onboarding, innovation development). It's cost-effective and easy for you to develop and deploy.
Gamification is also effective improving a range of things in different areas:
Cognitive skills
Gamification has been shown to improve skills such as knowledge retention, problem solving, decision making, risk taking and leadership. Some of the techniques that can be used to impact these skills are:
Elaborating with new information that ties to old information
Sorting information to improve learners conceptual knowledge
Word, term and image association
Repeating content to help with retention of concepts
Using stories to teach concepts
Replaying
Testing knowledge with trivia
Attitudes, Values, and Beliefs
Gamification can be used to effect peoples attitudes, values and belief to focus on a desired change. Some of the gamification techniques that can help improve attitudes and values include:
Creating an experience people want to participate in
Utilizing learners intrinsic motivators (rewards, recognition, self-efficacy)
Creating immersive learning experiences
Focusing on inspirational activities and events
Psychomotor Skills
Psychomotor skills include physical movement, coordination, and use of the motor-skill areas. Gamification can help improve these skills and knowledge by using these techniques:
Identifying the steps involved in a particular skill, and establishing standards for mastery of that skill
Presenting videos that show the skill being performed properly
Demonstrating an automated sequence the learner moves through as each element of the skill
Gamification Best Practices
Focus on critical skills.
Identify the top eight or so basic skills that are critical to each role inside your organization, and their desired knowledge and performance levels and create training around those topics.
Employ scientifically proven delivery methods.
Gamified learning works particularly well with new learning techniques based on significant findings in cognitive science research. When you employ these techniques in a gamified learning environment, employees don't even realize that it's a formal testing process, which greatly reduces the stress factor.
Personalize the learning
People prefer things that meet their learning needs and interests. Therefore by personalizing the learning, you make it much easier for your employees to take in and digest.
Leverage incentives for participation
Introduce relevant incentives to drive continued engagement in the training material.
Integrate learning into each workday
Gamified learning is great for delivering short, effective bursts of information each day. These bursts help with knowledge retention and is effective in time spans from 60 seconds to 60 minutes per day.
Delivery methods that work well with Gamification
The Spacing Effect
Also known as interval reinforcement, is a technique that is delivers learning in short, daily bursts, often in a work setting. This technique gives people the ability to reinforce classroom or LMS training, keep critical information in the forefront of their mind and increase knowledge retention.
Retrieval Practice
Retrieval practice is when a learner is provided with a concept and is immediately tested on recall. The knowledge is quickly refreshed, and the learner is again tested on recall.
Want to read the whole article?
Check out the full article in the link below:
Source:
Association for Talent Development
Originally Written by: Carol Leaman
https://www.td.org/magazines/td-magazine/boost-basic-job-skills-training