Ten Steps to Complex Learning presents a path from a training problem to a training solution in a way that students, practitioners (both instructional designers and teachers), and researchers can understand and easily use. Practitioners can use this book as a reference guide to support their design of courses, materials, or environments for complex learning. Students in the field of instructional design can use this book to broaden their knowledge of the design of training programs for complex learning. Now fully revised to incorporate the most current research in the field, this second edition of Ten Steps to Complex Learning includes user-friendly examples and case studies, and demonstrates the application of the ten steps in relation to the design of serious games, learning networks, social media, and new developments in educational neuroscience.

Ten Steps to Complex Learning presents a path from an educational problem to a solution in a way that students, practitioners, and researchers can understand and easily use. Students in the field of instructional design can use this book to broaden their knowledge of the design of training programs for complex learning. Practitioners can use this book as a reference guide to support their design of courses, curricula, or environments for complex learning. Now fully revised to incorporate the most current research in the field, this third edition of Ten Steps to Complex Learning includes many references to recent research as well as two new chapters. One new chapter deals with the training of 21st-century skills in educational programs based on the Ten Steps. The other deals with the design of assessment programs that are fully aligned with the Ten Steps. In the closing chapter, new directions for the further development of the Ten Steps are discussed.

Thirty six senior students in chemical engineering were randomly assigned to three treatment groups in an experimental study that examined the impact of different instructional strategies for troubleshooting malfunctions in a computer-based simulation of a chemical processing plant. In two groups, different types of worked examples, process-oriented and product-oriented, were given to participants as instructional strategies for troubleshooting four plant malfunctions. The third group was given a conventional problem solving strategy for the same four problems. The results of participants' performance on solving a set of eight near-transfer problems indicated no significant transfer differences among the treatments. Neither did a far transfer task result in any significant differences. The findings of the current study supported the notion of the "expertise reversal effect" (Kalyuga, Ayres, Chandler, & Sweller, 2003), which argues that presenting new information to learners with pre-existing schemata in a given domain does not improve transfer and may induce extraneous cognitive load. Given the prior knowledge of the participants, these findings were also consistent with Sweller's (2004) thesis on the "central executive function" and his description of the "redundancy effect."

Skill Acquisition and Training describes the building blocks of cognitive, motor, and teamwork skills, and the factors to take into account in training them. The basic processes of perception, cognition and action that provide the foundation for understanding skilled performance are discussed in the context of complex task requirements, individual differences, and extreme environmental demands. The role of attention in perceiving, selecting, and becoming aware of information, in learning new information, and in performance is described in the context of specific skills. A theme throughout this book is that much learning is implicit; the types of knowledge and relations that can profitably be learned implicitly and the conditions under which this learning benefits performance are discussed. The question of whether skill acquisition in cognitive domains shares underlying mechanisms with the acquisition of perceptual and motor skills is also addressed with a view to identifying commonalities that allow for widely applicable, general theories of skill acquisition. Because the complexity of real-world environments puts demands on the individual to adapt to new circumstances, the question of how skills research can be applied to organizational training contexts is an important one. To address this, this book dedicates much content to practical applications, covering such issues as how training needs can be captured with task and job analyses and how to maximize training transfer by taking trainee self-efficacy and goal orientation into account. This comprehensive yet readable textbook is optimized for students of cognitive psychology looking to understand the intricacies of skill acquisition.

The routine jobs of yesterday are being replaced by technology and/or shipped off-shore. In their place, job categories that require knowledge management, abstract reasoning, and personal services seem to be growing. The modern workplace requires workers to have broad cognitive and affective skills. Often referred to as "21st century skills," these skills include being able to solve complex problems, to think critically about tasks, to effectively communicate with people from a variety of different cultures and using a variety of different techniques, to work in collaboration with others, to adapt to rapidly changing environments and conditions for performing tasks, to effectively manage one's work, and to acquire new skills and information on one's own. The National Research Council (NRC) has convened two prior workshops on the topic of 21st century skills. The first, held in 2007, was designed to examine research on the skills required for the 21st century workplace and the extent to which they are meaningfully different from earlier eras and require corresponding changes in educational experiences. The second workshop, held in 2009, was designed to explore demand for these types of skills, consider intersections between science education reform goals and 21st century skills, examine models of high-quality science instruction that may develop the skills, and consider science teacher readiness for 21st century skills. The third workshop was intended to delve more deeply into the topic of assessment. The goal for this workshop was to capitalize on the prior efforts and explore strategies for assessing the five skills identified earlier. The Committee on the Assessment of 21st Century Skills was asked to organize a workshop that reviewed the assessments and related research for each of the five skills identified at the previous workshops, with special attention to recent developments in technology-enabled assessment of critical thinking and problem-solving skills. In designing the workshop, the committee collapsed the five skills into three broad clusters as shown below: Cognitive skills: nonroutine problem solving, critical thinking, systems thinking Interpersonal skills: complex communication, social skills, team-work, cultural sensitivity, dealing with diversity Intrapersonal skills: self-management, time management, self-development, self-regulation, adaptability, executive functioning Assessing 21st Century Skills provides an integrated summary of the presentations and discussions from both parts of the third workshop.

The ability to interpret and apply cases is a skill that is a key to successful transferable learning. In this work, we make the following claim: If learners in project-based inquiry classes are able to understand, engage in, and carry out the processes involved in interpreting and applying cases effectively to their projects, they will not only learn those cases contents and lessons deeply and be able to apply those lessons later, but they may also be able to transfer interpretation and application skills to some other learning situations where application of cases is appropriate. This work seeks to understand and describe the path along which middle-school students in a project-based inquiry learning environment acquire and develop the skills needed to apply expert cases to solve science problems. We do this in the context of a system of scaffolds designed such that students will be scaffolded as cognitive apprenticeship suggests whether working individually, in groups, or as a class.