I Can Remember That

There are three levels of training:

• Remember
• Use
• Integrate. 

This post describes 1) training to remember aka knowledge-based training.

The first level is to have learners learn and remember facts, rules, procedures, and concepts.

Facts are facts—State capitals, favorite authors, company values, formulas for calculations.  Everyone knows many facts and can recall them.

Rules are unvarying steps for solving a problem—How to give an injection, how to disarm your home alarm, how to log-in to your network.  We can easily remember the rules that we follow repeatedly.

Procedures are steps that vary from one case to the other for completing a process—Steps (and options) for installing software on your home computer, steps for planning a dinner party, directions (and alternate directions) to the bank.  We can easily remember the procedures for a variety of processes we do everyday at home, at work, and in between. 

Concepts are characteristics that define a thing or class of things—What determines if an animal is a cat, what characteristics do entrepreneurs exhibit, what determines if it's an emergency.  It's not difficult to list the characteristics of the key concepts in our lives.

In my next post, I'll talk about the second level—learning to use.