Active Training Group Research Articles

Simplifying the treatment of the human aspect of management

For some time it has seemed to me that the time has come to take stock, to look around and to decide where we have got to in the training and management business. In the UK we have experienced a frenzied gadarene rush to change the work situation by a mass of new legislation, unequalled in volume at any other time in our history. And all this has happened since 1965. But turbulent change in ideas on managing and developing the labour force was well under way before that date, particularly in the United States, In Scandinavia and generally on the Continent, though it took a different form in every country. The modern age of management started about twenty years ago. It threw up, over that time, a veritable avalanche of new concepts, theories and practices in the management and development of the labour force. To some extent the situation was chaotic in that the various innovations were not related to each other, each one seeming to provide its own panacea, in competition with the rest. In retrospect it begins to look different, as though these Innovations are, in fact, very closely related to each other or are alternative expressions of some basic underlying objective, only dimly understood at the time. To the trainer or change agent it matters enormously whether this new age of management follows a consistent theme or whether it represents a set of random concepts in conflict with each other. If the former situation holds, then we had better clarify in our minds what this consistent theme is and start to use it as a base for our management policy and our training policies; if the latter situation holds then we have no chance of developing a coherent approach to management, and our training is left virtually without objectives. This presentation of mine, which I am gradually developing and refining through using it with active training groups, is very suitable for in‐company use. My purpose is to present the full range of concepts which has emerged in this field, to try to trace the coherent theme which runs through them, to slim down the lot considerably so that I can present a complete treatment in the course of two or three hours or so and to simplify, to simplify even further and further still. It is essentially a potted though complete version of the human aspect of management and I use it either on its own or as an introduction to a course where the various concepts are later treated in greater depth. I adapt it to my audience. In this journal my audience consists of trainers and others of like mind. That explains the form it takes on this occasion.

Effects of Informative Feedback and Active Training upon Concept Attainment

Informative feedback procedures were compared with active training in concept attainment. 60 first-, second-, and third-grade children were presented with conjunctive concepts and assigned at random to each of 12 groups. The stimuli were drawings on cards representing the concepts. A 4 × 3 factorial design was employed which involved 3 combinations of feedback plus active training and 3 levels of task complexity. The results showed the informative feedback groups (right-wrong, nothing-wrong and right-nothing) discovered the concepts faster than the active training groups. Over all 3 levels of task difficulty the right-wrong condition yielded significantly better performance than the other feedback conditions and, in addition, nothing-wrong resulted in a faster rate of learning than right-nothing.