Customer Reviews

Building Expertise : Cognitive Methods for Training and Performance Improvement

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Building Expertise, by Ruth Clark, is an excellent book for instructional designers, course developers and technical communicators who are interested in using research-based psychological theory to build effective training materials. Clark effectively summarizes the research, while also giving real-world training examples. I found Clark's comparison of the four instructional architectures (receptive, directive, guided discovery and exploratory) to be very useful when designing computer and web-based training. Clark summarizes cognitive theories concerning working memory, long term memory and attention and then describes instructional methods to deal with the limits of each. Although not a "how-to" book, Building Expertise provides practical, research-based guidelines for designing training materials.

Ruth Colvin Clark lays out the basic theories and research findings from cognitive psychology and expands on their implications for designing effective instruction. This book is intended for instructional designers who want to learn the deeper theories underlying the methods of their profession. It is equally useful for cognitive scientists who want to keep their research relevant to educational practice.

Clark begins with four foundation chapters which define expertise in terms of cognitive performance and derive instructional principles designed to foster the development of expertise. The next eight chapters describe how expertise develops given the basic human constraints of working memory, attention, and long-term memory contents and structures. The book describes how initial learning becomes valuable as it is transferred to performance. The remaining chapters describe how carefully designed instruction can motivate learners and develop expertise that is adaptive to solving a variety of problems in varied contexts.

This book is well-written and draws on a reasonable sample of current research literature--although the author does oversample her own work just a bit. Plain language and an extensive glossary make the book's content accessible to readers with little background in either instructional design or cognitive psychology. The diagrams and flowcharts that illustrate complex theories and processes are particularly well done, exemplifying good instructional design by highlighting key concepts and minimizing irrelevant detail.

Readers may also enjoy Developing Technical Training and Graphics for Learning by the same author, who practices as well as preaches good design in her work.