In a recent blog post titled “The Human Information Processing System: How People Learn (or Don’t),” we went over five key steps in which people learn and later apply information. In this post, we’ll look at the transition from Step 1, “We experience information through our senses and sensory memory,” to Step 2, “Some of that information is processed by our working memory.”

As we learned earlier, in Step 1 sensory information (sights, sounds, etc.) is perceived by our sense organs (eyes, ears, etc.) and is briefly processed by our sensory memory. The information stays in our sensory information for a very short time—in many cases, only a fraction of a second, though in some cases, it may last for a few seconds.

Some of that information goes on to be processed by our working memory; this is when we become aware of the information. The rest of that information is essentially lost. This is why people sometimes say that the working memory is a “bottleneck” within the learning process. And it’s why if you’re trying to help employees learn, you want to try to draw their attention to the right stuff to get past that bottleneck.

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In a recent blog post titled “Why People Don’t Remember Their Training: Five Steps of Learning and Applying Information,” we introduced a few basic ideas about how people think and learn (that process, by the way, is known as cognition).

In that post, we briefly mentioned a five-step process of learning, and noted that when people forget what they learned in training, it’s often because the training was designed without keeping these five steps in mind.

In this article, we’re going to take a closer look at each of those five steps.

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You tell them, and you tell them, and you tell them again, and they still don’t learn.

Sound familiar? Have you ever uttered these words to yourself after a training session?

If so, you may need to remind yourself of some old cliches:

• Telling ain’t training
• Learners aren’t empty vessels you pour information into
• Don’t be the sage on the stage
• Don’t spray and pray

So if you hold training sessions, and your employees seem to forget the training immediately, it may be time to quit blaming them and turn your thoughts inward: what can you do to create more memorable training experiences? How can you help workers remember and apply what they learned during training when they’re back on the job?

To that end, we’re going to give you a quick overview of how people process, store, and later retrieve information. This is the first step to making training that’s more memorable.

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Have you heard the Miles Davis song “Seven Steps to Heaven?”

Well, this post isn’t about that song. Although it’s a great tune, to be sure. You’ve got to love that bass playing by Ron Carter and you can tell that this band was on its way to being Miles’ next great quintet.

Why mention the song, then? To make a comparison between the song title and the real topic of this post, of course. The title of Davis’ tune alludes to two things. The first is a sequential, orderly process—the seven steps. And the second is the desired end place—heaven.

There’s something similar in instruction (or training), too. It’s called the Nine Events of Instruction, and it’s based on a theory by instructional designer Robert Gagne.

Just like the Davis song title, Gagne’s theory also suggests a sequential, orderly process–the nine steps. And it leads to a desired end place–effective instruction/training. If you’re in the world of instructional design, training, or human performance improvement, effective training is the desired end place you’re interested in. So we don’t have to tell you why you’d want to know what those nine events are.

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