Experimenting in my Organization

I was intrigued by the chapter on test subjects in the book I'm currently reading, The Dissertation Journey. My organization allows me to practice and develop teaching techniques on our adult learners who visit us each day. We get over 1000 field workers from the refining industry come through our doors each day. We train them on safety and skills that are necessary to keep them safe at their jobs. My role is to improve the level of our instruction both through computer based training (CBT) and our instructor-led training classes.

Naturally, if I'm asked to improve our level of instruction, it's necessary to try things out on groups of learners and get feedback. If we have a control group and an experimental group, and if what I've proposed works, then there is a chance that the experimental group will get more and better training than the control group. This in turn means that the control group is not as well trained.

This could be a real problem when dealing with dangerous equipment, hazardous chemicals, or safety training. For example, we ran a test to see if micro-learning training would be effective for a Basic Refinery training class. Throughout the day we send micro-learning courses to our learner's cell phones, then gauged whether or not they class as a whole performed better on the final exams than those classes without micro-learning reinforcement. The intent was to determine if "spaced practice" events were beneficial to the learner. Again, a major concern was that those other classes that did not get the benefit of the spaced practice might not be as well trained, or as prepared for events in their job lives. 

What we have settled on is to ensure that we never go below the set training standard that is mandated by OSHA or that we have set for ourselves as an organization. In the Army we were taught that we could always do more than an explicit order demanded, but we could never do less. We could add to an order, but never take away from. We are following this same standard with our experiments at my organization. Naturally we want all of our learners to be given the opportunity to train more effectively, but to gauge that effectiveness we have to be able to have a standard and measure against it. Still, it's nice to have the thought experiment that comes about after reading Ch. 5 that makes us re-evaluate our techniques to ensure we are putting the safety of our learners first and foremost in our processes.

Reference:

Roberts, C. & Hyatt, L. (2019). The dissertation journey (3rd edition). Corwin Press.