Survey Results: Student Preparedness & Satisfaction Following Pool/Confined Water

[RJP]

I took the PADI online e-course, about a 45 minute pool session and 4 open water dives to get my OW. It was completely inadequate training. Since then I have done a lot of reading, video time, diving and AOW to try and make up for the initial deficit. My son wants to get certified this spring and after calling all the lds within driving distance, I chose a course that is 6 weeks, 12 hours class, 12 hours pool + 4 ow dives. He may get bored but hopefully he will be a better / safer diver for the extra time spent.

Consider showing him the data to support what you're saying.

 

[widget]

Saw some interesting data recently suggesting that the divers with the best retention rates are those who did academic/pool at home... and referral checkout dives in a warm-water location. Is it possible they get "the best of both worlds"?

Sure, I think that makes sense, its always easier to teach a student when they are warm and comfortable and are able to make rational calculated decisions, trying to teach a student who is cold, uncomfortable, not thinking clearly and possibly even wondering if this is as good as it gets is a much more difficult task. I have always found those students give up quicker.

 

[beanojones]

Consider showing him the data to support what you're saying.

But that's reading the data in one weird way only.

The data you collected shows that the instructors are not actually using the time well at all. It's not a question of time, it's a question of time spent diving.

And this is ignoring the biggest problem with forcing young kids into long boring classes.

Boring students and making students cold (especially young people) is a good way to get them to not commit to the activity. And no matter how warm the pool is, kids get cold fast. They simply do not need the time that parents do to get the skills done. You can send the average kid out with a list of skills to do and he will just do them.

Swim around the pool without a mask for ten minutes while doing gear R&R? No problem.

Make them stay stationary losing body heat while they wait for the adults to finally get the mask clear done? They will vote to never dive again because pain is not fun.

 

[RJP]

But that's reading the data in one weird way only.

The data you collected shows that the instructors are not actually using the time well at all. It's not a question of time, it's a question of time spent diving.

And this is ignoring the biggest problem with forcing young kids into long boring classes.

Boring students and making students cold (especially young people) is a good way to get them to not commit to the activity. And no matter how warm the pool is, kids get cold fast. They simply do not need the time that parents do to get the skills done. You can send the average kid out with a list of skills to do and he will just do them.

Swim around the pool without a mask for ten minutes while doing gear R&R? No problem.

Make them stay stationary losing body heat while they wait for the adults to finally get the mask clear done? They will vote to never dive again because pain is not fun.

As mentioned in the study write up... the best pool-session structure can't make up for crappy instruction. Conversely, great instructors probably have more lee-way with course structure.

But all other things held equal... there must be SOME reason why courses with pool sessions held over a longer period of time (longer than 1-2 weeks) produce divers that feel significantly more prepared for OW and are more satisfied with their experience overall.

PS - of course letting students get cold is bad, and was shown in the study to correlate with lower preparedness for OW dives and low overall satisfaction... regardless of length of course.

Sure, I think that makes sense, its always easier to teach a student when they are warm and comfortable and are able to make rational calculated decisions, trying to teach a student who is cold, uncomfortable, not thinking clearly and possibly even wondering if this is as good as it gets is a much more difficult task. I have always found those students give up quicker.

To be clear... students who do their ENTIRE training in warm water have a significantly higher drop-out rate than those that do pool work locally and referral dives in a warm location.

If what you say is true - and it may well be - what then is the explanation for "tropically trained" divers dropping out at higher rate?

 

[beanojones]

To be clear... students who do their ENTIRE training in warm water have a far higher drop-out rate than those that do pool locally and referral dives in a warm location.

If what you say is true - and it may well be - what is the explanation for "tropically trained" divers dropping out?

How do most people dive? They plan and travel to a location to go diving. Which is the basic repeatable behavior of a non-drop out diver.

People who travel to a warm place, and while they are there decide to do a course, are not practicing the basic dive behavior which is planning a dive vacation.

(I would argue with the idea that tropically trained divers dropping out on at least one metric, because there is no one diving like locals in the tropics do. I have friends who dive hundreds of dives a year, year in and year out. But that's counting dive numbers not numbers of divers. It's still a fact that Hawaii and Florida sell way, way more gear than anywhere else though, and a big part of the market is the local market.)

(But it's the local focused instructors teaching these divers, and not the tourist focused instructors.

Tourist focused instrcutors are quite often horrible, irrepsonsible instructors. I would not trust most of them with my loved ones.)

 

[boulderjohn]

Can you explain the meaning of the "30% practice time" caption?
...
Almost no one wants to hear an instructor talk about anything (except, of course, the instructor himself. The instructor really really loves the sound of their own voice.). The divers to be, they want to dive. That's why they take the course. Not to listen to the instructor, or to watch unrealistic skill demonstrations, but to actually do things themselves.

How can any instructor not spend almost 100% of the time in a pool having students dive? In the ocean as Confined Water, we have control issues that keep us from turning people loose to frolic around. We have to either sit students out or keep from the swimming at certain times.

You may have misunderstood the idea of the percentage of pool time spent diving. Your posts seem to indicate your are thinking of two categories of pool time: 1) instructor briefing and 2) diving. That is not what the survey data meant. There are actually three categories: 1) instructor briefing, 2) skill demonstrations and student performance of skills, and 3) swimming around to practice neutral buoyancy swimming while not demonstrating a skill. The survey attempted to find out about category #3. Under the old PADI standards, it was possible to spend about 98% of pool time on items #1 and #2 and still be within standards. Almost no neutral buoyancy swimming was required. There was not one second of neutral buoyancy swimming not connected to a specific skill in the class I took, and I suspect there has been a lot of that in a lot of places over the years.

 

[descent]

... People who travel to a warm place, and while they are there decide to do a course, are not practicing the basic dive behavior which is planning a dive vacation.

This is a revelation to me.

I have never planned a dive vacation. But I have spent weeks or even months planning travel and routes for a harder climb, with nauseating attention to detail.

That experience is nothing at all like what we do when I say, "Let's go up to Tahoe this weekend for the music festival."

 

[RJP]

People who travel to a warm place, and while they are there decide to do a course, are not practicing the basic dive behavior which is planning a dive vacation.

Perhaps the fact that they were not yet divers when they arrived had something to do with them not having planned a dive vacation?

 

[TSandM]

When I did my OW class, the confined water sessions were run the way I see most of them run when I watch other instructors. All the students got on the bottom of the pool and sat, and the instructor started at one end and had each student demonstrate whichever skill was being done, while the others watched. If we got through the skills the instructor wanted to cover in that session, we were cut loose at the end for ten minutes or so of free swimming. The instructor had us all under "direct control", but most of that consisted of demonstrating that we could sit still and not drown.

In contrast, we run our confined water sessions quite differently -- but the technique is dependent on having one or more CAs in the pool, which we always do. The group, of whatever size, is broken into buddy pairs. My husband, the instructor, works with one buddy pair at a time, and the others are free swimming with the CAs. Any skill a student has done for Peter is fair game for the CAs to request, and we do it while the students are swimming.

This has two nice results: The students have a lot of time to practice the most important diving skill, which is buoyancy control, and they finish the class having done many of their skills ten or more times, instead of the one time in front of the instructor that is sufficient for standards. They also don't get as cold.

 

[RJP]

It seems to me that there's really no reason that pool sessions can't be fun... in and of themselves. Sure, it's not the same as some beautiful tropical location, but that's no excuse.