Designing SOPs for Learners

My col­league Keltie Cameron-Choi and I wanted to design a Stan­dard Oper­at­ing Pro­ce­dure that fos­ters learn­ing, specif­i­cally reten­tion (remem­ber­ing the steps) and trans­fer (apply­ing the steps in new sit­u­a­tions). The premise is that learn­ers who under­stand SOPs are bet­ter equipped to apply the instruc­tions appro­pri­ately and find new oppor­tu­ni­ties for improve­ment in a qual­ity sys­tem. What emerged from the redesign was an SOP stripped of famil­iar con­ven­tions that often impede learn­ing yet still agrees with good doc­u­men­ta­tion practices.

This poster, which depicts a before and after SOP, and the list of evidence-based cog­ni­tive prin­ci­ples that informed the redesign, was pre­sented this month at the AABB Annual Meet­ing and sums up our find­ings so far. But we ran out of hand­outs! So, we are mak­ing them avail­able here in the hopes that they will help you design bet­ter SOPs.

This work is syn­the­sized from stud­ies by Richard E. Mayer, Jeroen J. G. von Mer­rien­boer, John Sweller, Ruth Colvin Clark and many other cog­ni­tive researchers and prac­ti­tion­ers explor­ing how peo­ple learn from words and pic­tures. Any errors in inter­pre­ta­tion are ours alone. Kristina Van­der­woude drew the car­toons. (One of the ben­e­fits of projects like this is dis­cov­er­ing the latent tal­ents of your co-workers.) Finally, do note that the SOPs depicted in the poster are purely fic­ti­tious and are not imple­mented in any work­place, includ­ing our own.

We hope you find these use­ful. Do let us know how your SOPs turn out.

Down­load: Design­ing SOPs for Learn­ers poster (pdf, 11.38 MB)
Down­load: Cog­ni­tive prin­ci­ples check­list (pdf, 504.01 KB)
384 poster and 231 check­list down­loads so far!