A recent project has involved the concept of “negative learning”. Negative learning refers to unintended takeaways from a learning experience that are inaccurate, misleading, or even harmful. These may not be discovered by the educators or facilitators until well into a learning experience or afterwards. The usual strategy in instructional design is to anticipate these through solid design methodologies, learner (novice) empathy, testing with live learners, and open feedback loops with learners.

A Subtext in Instructional Design

Subject matter experts are often very deservedly confident in their fields. When it comes to presenting learning, they may present ideas in very broad strokes or with insufficient examples for novice learners to understand. They may approach learning with assumptions of others’ understanding that “mirror” their own, which may well be a highly dubious assumption. One major job in education is to unravel the learning back to the proper developmental level for learners, so the focus of the work is not too high.

Much higher education learning is based on language and imagery and multimedia. All these elements are highly polysemic or many-meaninged. The intention behind a message may not be conveyed in terms of the actual message received.

The variable nature of the learners also means that the “receivers” of the message and the interactors in the e-learning spaces may not be assumed to have particular backgrounds. Even if the message built is clean and purposive, it’ll be critical to understand the messages that the learners are receiving. Further feedback and elaboration may be necessary.

Identifying Rookie Assumptions and the Expert-Rookie Gap

Much of learning requires the identification of the gap between experts in a field and the novice / rookie learners. Identifying the places where rookies stumble will be important in order to provide them with the support necessary.

In order to walk through this endeavor, I brainstormed some rookie assumptions about writing. Novice student writers tend to be cautious. They seem to view the application of communications strategy in writing as problematic and somehow unfair. They lack confidence in the expression of their opinions as if one way is the right way to express ideas. They tend towards straight emulation—from textbooks, from websites, or from their peers. They tend not to take any risks.

Many lack exposure to reading. Many hover in their areas of comfort only in terms of selecting topics of interest, and they are unwilling to make the effort to reach out outside their areas of expertise. In summarizing writing, they have a hard time differentiating between what is relevant and what is irrelevant. Many do not have strong sourcing skills to verify the power or accuracy of the information they’re looking at.

Many cannot carry a cogent line of argumentation. They confuse making an assertion with proving a point—without the necessary logics and evidence in between.

Heading Off Negative Learning

There are many strategies used in heading off negative learning. Simply put, designing the learning to be clear is one strategy. Another is encouraging broad feedback from learners to find out what is going on. Another is to support learners with plenty of learning and plenty of examples.

This is not about shutting down serendipity or open learning or chance factors. This is not about rigidity; rather, it’s the opposite. It’s about supporting students where they are and providing a coherent learning experience…to properly reflect the subject matter domain.