Sorry I found this thread so late. A lot of it touches on my vocation.
I'm not sure exactly how to do it but the best approach - which I assume is what the current method is attempting - is one that allows the the instructor to determine where/when/why/how the STUDENT will FAIL. It's cliche, but we learn by our mistakes, not our successes.
It may be a cliché, but educational research does not support it. Research shows
overwhelmingly that learning is most effective when the student is skillfully led through a series of
true successes to reach a high standard of accomplishment. Success breeds success. Failure breeds failure.
A student who successfully overcomes one true challenge after another en route to a high standard has a faster skill development than a student who has a series of failures. That student will also become positively motivated, while the student who has consistently failed will eventually become unmotivated and ready to quit at the first opportunity.
The cause for this seems to go beyond our human psyche. When rats are exposed to a series of problems for which they are able to find successful solutions, they will struggle to the end to find a solution to a life/death scenario. Rats who were prepared with a series of no-win problems prior to the same scenario give up almost immediately and accept death.
I don't think the issue is whether a single failure or multiple failures is training is better. The issue is how many failures become too many. All agencies have multiple failure scenarios written into the standards
Just as a reminder to those who do not recall the context of the quoted post, the poster is using the word
failure in a different sense from the quote above. He is referring to the failures introduced by the instructor as a problem to solve in a training scenario. I believe he is perfectly correct here.
Although
this article is on a different educational topic, part of it is germane. Well designed instruction plans with the end in mind. What do I want the student to learn, and what is the best path to get the student there? You begin with a challenge the student can handle and then step by step add complexity. If each step is not significantly more challenging than the preceding one, the student does not learn enough and becomes bored. If a step requires too great a leap, the student will fail and be frustrated.
Here is a description of an actual training process I witnessed. The goal was to learn bottle passing.
Step 1: The students were at the OW site in which they are being evaluated for the skill requirements for a certification level. There was a brief (1-2 minute explanation) of the process and purpose. Students were told that on the ensuing dive they would attempt to complete the bottle passing requirement for the course while doing simulated decompression stops.
Step 2: Students descended to the line carrying AL 80 stage bottles. The beginning of the ascent was where the ascent line began, inches above a very fine silt bottom. The line ascended right next to a fine silt wall, and students had been told emphatically that they were not to raise silt. As they reached the bottom, the instructor introduced a failure by putting one of the divers OOA on back gas, so they went to the ascent line doing an air share. They began to do the switch to their AL 80 deco bottles, and, as expected, the instructor made one of them fail so that they had to pass a bottle.
The first pass was clumsy in just getting the bottle to the diver, who struggled to maintain perfect buoyancy as he accepted the full AL 80- inches above the silt. That diver then struggled to clip the bottom bolt snap to the hip D-ring, given that this was the first time he had ever done it, he was sharing air, and he had the bulk of 2 AL 80s under his arm. He brushed the bank several times in this struggle. He finally clipped the snap bolt to the loop of the snap bolt for the inner bottle rather than the D-ring. Eventually the two made successful but clumsy passes throughout the ascent.
Step 3: On the surface, the instructor explained to them how the bottle should have been passed.
Step 4: In film study that evening, the camera and instructor focus first on the puffs of silt being raised. The camera critically zooms in and focuses on the clipping to the other bolt snap. The video shows how the diver has lost some trim while securing the bottle. The instructor makes it clear that things have to get better when they do it again, which will not be at least for another month when they have their next OW evaluation. They need to do a lot of practice before that. There is nothing positive to be said about the experience.
The instructor openly believes that students learn through failure, and doing otherwise is "holding their hands."
I believe that the students would have been better served by a full explanation followed by a demonstration followed by practice with smaller AL 40s and without the complication of the silt and the the OOA scenario. Once those steps had been completed successfully, the students could have completed the assessment without a hitch.
Back to the quote above: multiple failures in a scenario is an effective learning tool once the student has mastered the components of those failures individually. When the multiple failures become too many for the student to handle or when they interfere with the learning of a new skill (as in my example), they are counterproductive.
In my experience, the most dangerous failure is what I call "The Smug Alert" failure named after the South Park episode that inspired it. It happens when divers start to feel really good about their training and experience and become lost in a cloud of smug that reduces visualization and the ability to respect all dives, no matter how benign, as "real" and potentially life-threatening.
This is the result of what I call
false success. False success occurs when you give the student too little challenge to master and/or praise them unduly for poor performances without requiring that they achieve true success.
