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****3-DIGIT 342

FAN SMITH212J JUN96 R 1 423*

JOHN SMITH

212 MAIN ST

FORESTVILLE MD 20747

http//www.faa gov/avr/news/newshome htm

FRONT COVER:An Aerostar 601B with the gear up. (Piper Aircraft photo)

BACK COVER: And a Piper Seneca with the gear down. (G.S. Livack photo)

"Remember what we did last les

son?"

"Huh?"

"Last lesson? Remember?"
"Huh?"

In preparing for the Fundamentals of Instruction Knowledge Test, every CFI who's reading this has studied the "Law of Primacy." As you remember, that particular law of learning says that the first method or knowledge taught to a student for a given situation is the one student will most likely remember.

What's more, replacing the first way someone learns to do something with new knowledge is difficult, which is why it's hard to teach new methods to people who originally learned something different. That's why it's important to transfer the "right" information the first time. Instill the wrong stuff at the beginning and your student may never get straightened out.

Until recently I'd always viewed the Rule of Primacy as applying primarily to student training. As a practicing flight instructor, I never thought I, too, might be a victim of this principle. Not long ago I learned that traditional teaching methods leave a lot to be desired, so now I'm scrambling to rede

fine my teaching methods so I can better educate my students. Man, that old Law of Primacy is fighting me all the way, but if I can improve my teaching I'm dedicated to winning the battle.

My awakening began in April 1998 at the first annual International Flight Instructor Conference, which is sponsored by NAFI and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU). There I attended a seminar given by ERAU Professor Dr. Mike Wiggins. Mike blew the doors off this group of experienced CFI's by sharing fundamental facts about how people learn and, therefore, how we should teach. It was an eye-opener!

Before going further it's worth noting that not everyone in the room was affected as strongly as I was. Many of the principles Mike teaches are wellknown by professional educators, and I'd always thought that we instructors. were part of that group. But school teachers receive a great deal of formal education in principles of teaching, and a CFI's education leans almost exclusively toward the technical details of aviation.

For most CFI's, formal training in how to teach boils down to memorizing

a few rote answers so they can pass the Fundamentals of Instruction Knowledge Test and get on with the "important stuff" on the main Flight Instructor Knowledge Test. Any additional teaching skills are picked up from their own. instructors, spiked over time with a healthy course in the school of hard knocks. I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that neat stuff from the art and science of teaching never reaches most of us. Just to whet your appetite, let me share a few fascinating insights this 20-year flight instructor learned at Dr. Wiggins's seminar.

A key concept in Mike's work is the transfer of learning-meaning how well we instructors deliver what we know to the mind of our student. Like computers, our brains incorporate two kinds of memory: short-term "working memory" (like RAM on your PC) and longterm memory for permanently recording information (call it the hard drive).

Information entering the brain arrives first in short-term memory for processing. There, if everything is working correctly, transient stuff-like the radio frequency just assigned-is processed and discarded. Information to be stored for future recovery-like input from a

flight instructor-is identified and transferred to long-term memory.

Mentally immerse yourself for a moment in the cockpit during a recent lesson; conjure up the drone of the engine and interject some radio interruptions. Your student is under the hood and sweating through an IFR approach. As the CFI, you're coaching, cajoling, informing, reminding, challenging, and sharing the finer points of the segments of the approach. How much will your student absorb? Will he[she] remember what you've taught him[her]? And if so, how much?

Interesting transfer-of-learning fact number one: A person can retain only five to nine bits of information in shortterm memory at a time. If we instructors share more than a small number of facts in short order, the student dumps information overboard without absorbing it. What's more, information. coming from the radio, flight controls, and instruments competes for those same five-to-nine slots. With this incoming information overload, before sharing a salient point with the student we might want to take the controls to free up a few information slots.

For students to remember what we're teaching them, their brains must transfer the information that reaches their short-term memory to their longterm memory. It sounds simple enough until you learn that it takes five to 10 seconds for the brain to process a block of information from short-term memory and install it into long-term memory. If we want our students to remember an important point, we should give them five to 10 seconds of silence before sharing the next one.

"One-one-thousandth, two-one

thousandths, three-one-thousandths, four-one-thousandths, five-one-thousandths, six-one-thousandths, seven

one-thousandths, eight-one-thousandths, nine-one-thousandths,

ten-one-thousandths..."

If we deliver information any faster than that, heck-they won't remember. And, if we deny students the necessary processing time, they can permanently lose the information in as little as 15 seconds!

It's easy to see that if the busy

cockpit described a few lines back sported as much rapid-fire instruction. as it sounds, all the CFI's hard work resulted in very little retained learning in his[her] student.

So now we know that if our students are to learn the material, we instructors know that we should share no more than a few educational nuggets in short order, and we should give them five to 10 seconds of silence before contributing more information.

Until now we've addressed the transfer of individual bits of information to our students. Let's back up and look at the bigger picture. Based on preliminary research, it appears that students can absorb only one or maybe two major learning experiences per lesson. "Hold on," you say, "If I teach only one major topic per lesson we can't meet the syllabus!"

"Could be," says Mike. "But try to teach more than that in one lesson and you'll just have to do it again next time."

Even limiting a lesson to one or two major topics doesn't ensure that students will learn everything. Ultimately, teachers must share important points approximately eight times in order for students to properly absorb, understand, and retain them.

That doesn't mean you repeat each point eight times in a row. Rather, instructors should revisit the material in a variety of ways, including verbal explanation, visual presentation, interactive discussion, and, when possible, applied logical reasoning. The greater the interval between topic reinforcement, the less effective the learning. It's best to revisit key points several times in the first session or two, with further repetition soon thereafter.

At his seminar, Mike demonstrated these principles to help us remember them. He listed the key points to remember, quizzed us on them, and then listed them again. Then he asked us to write down the ones we remembered, assembled us in groups to share and discuss the ones we remembered, and assigned group members to divide responsibility for remembering them. Finally, Mike asked each group to report on how it was all ac

complished. It works! That's why I remember much of the stuff I learned from him way back in April 1998.

How do we apply this new understanding to enhance student learning? Good lesson planning helps; organize each session around one or two major learning objectives. Share input and advice in bite-sized chunks, with silence between important points so students have time to transfer the information from their short-term to long-term memory. Reinforce important concepts through repetition using a variety of teaching methods.

It's also important to focus on key learning elements with little deviation. Don't try to teach everything you know about a given subject to your student. As instructors we draw from a large pool of experience and knowledge. Undoubtedly, part of the fun of teaching is sharing it, but it should be clear that delivering too much information in short order defeats our teaching objectives. It's better to transfer core knowledge thoroughly and effectively, and let nice-to-know-but-not-really-necessary stuff wait for another time.

Back to my Law of Primacy challenge. Now that I've learned just a few simple techniques for improving the transfer of learning between me and my students, I cannot believe how challenging it is for me to change my ways. How challenging it is for me to formulate and simplify what I want to say ahead of time, to express only relevant information, and, hardest of all, to keep my mouth shut between important points.

But it's worth it. While still refining my methods, I can already see results. Congratulations and many thanks to people like Mike Wiggins for challenging the Law of Primacy and sharing exciting new tools and insights for teaching. It takes me back to the wonderful kick as a student of overcoming old habits to grasp a better method, and thereby nailing the sweet spot on the ol' ILS. That's what makes flying so interesting always learning better ways and new tricks.

This article is reprinted with permission from the NAFI Mentor.

Pilots love to describe their great landings, some of which are characterized (usually by others) as "unconscious." However, to land while being unconscious, yet able to describe it is an entirely different matter. Ordinarily, a pilot's in-flight incapacitation brings about tragic consequences. -Federal Air Surgeon's Medical Bulletin Editor

In the afternoon of March 1, 1999, we were enjoying an exceptionally good Basic AME (aviation medical examiner) seminar. Dr. Allen Parmet, presenting aviation physiology, had started to tell the remarkable story of a pilot who lost consciousness while flying alone and woke up in a hay field. Before Dr. Parmet could finish, a voice from the back of the room exclaimed, "I was that pilot!"

Dr. Robert Frayser, from Hoisington, KS, who was attending his first AME seminar, took over telling this incredible, real-life incident that had happened to him just over a year ago in central Missouri. He had left his home airport at 7 a.m. enroute for Topeka, KS. "I was flying alone in my Comanche 400, cruising at 5,500 feet on autopilot, with the sun coming up on a clear, beautiful day." All was routine flying activity as he switched the fuel selector to the auxiliary tank and set up the navigation system for his destination.

After that, it was anything, but routine. "Then, I lost about an hour and a half of my life." The plane, trimmed for cruise flight and on autopilot, flew a perfectly straight course over Kansas until it ran out of fuel and glided to a landing near Cairo, MO. When he awoke, confused, disoriented, and groggy from a deep sleep, he thought he was still in the air and went through landing preparations. As he became more oriented to his surroundings, he realized that he was now on the ground-in a hayfield. The engine was silent. The airplane's right wing was nearly torn off from an impact with a small tree, but the plane was otherwise intact. Aside from some minor cuts and bruises, he seemed to be relatively uninjured. Frayser says he had no memory of landing.

Since the engine had stopped, no one heard the aircraft as it landed on the open field. "I was alone, disoriented, injured, and had a severe headache and ringing in my ears," he said.

Extracting himself from the aircraft, he struggled a quarter of a mile through snow-covered fields for help, finally finding a farmhouse. Still dazed, he says, "I tried to explain to the farmer what had happened," adding, "he probably thought I was crazy." Fortunately, the farmer called for help. Frayser was taken by ambulance to a local hospital, where the

emergency room physician put him. on 100 percent oxygen. He had a few cuts and bruises, sore ribs, and a fractured left wrist.

What had caused him to fall asleep? It wasn't an "alien encounter" or an unsolvable mystery. It was carbon monoxide poisoning from a cracked manifold that had allowed the deadly, nonirritating, odorless, colorless gas to seep into the cabin through the heater. The crack, which had apparently opened after the last annual inspection, was concealed by the heat shield and could not be detected during the pre-flight inspection. "The crack could have been there for a long time, just waiting for someone to turn. on the heater," he said.

Frayser did not have a carbon monoxide detector aboard to alert him. He stated that there were no early warnings or symptoms to alert him. "I just went to sleep."

Was it luck that he survived? Of course, luck had a lot to do with it. Just a few feet shorter and his "runway" would have been a plowed field. Had his glide angle been a little lower, he would have hit power lines. A slight wind gust could have changed the outcome dramatically. With more fuel on board, he could have flown another 30 minutes in the air and he probably would have succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning before the plane ever crashed.