Learning the secrets of the craft through the real-time experience of experts: capturing and transferring professional expert tacit knowledge to novices

Les départs à la retraite en masse de la génération baby-boomer ont mené au challenge actuel de renouvellement des pratiques de compagnonnage professionnel qui, traditionnellement, permettent la transmission des savoir-faire incorporés dans l’expertise manuelle développée avec le temps par les experts. Une recherche menée au sein du plus grand producteur français d’électricité a investigué comment la combinaison de la théorie de l’activité, de méthodes d’ethnographie vidéo et de méthodes psychologiques de verbalisation peut aider à améliorer à la fois la préservation du capital de connaissances et la formation professionnelle aux gestes métier. Cela a amené au développement d’une nouvelle méthode ECAST, dédiée à la capture et au transfert des connaissances tacites et explicites incorporées dans les gestes professionnels des experts, et aboutissant à la construction d’un support didactique pour la formation professionnelle. Cette ressource, appelée MAP, permet aux opérateurs d’apprendre directement au travers de l’expérience en temps réel des experts. Une évaluation qualitative du dispositif a montré une amélioration de la formation. À la suite de ces résultats, le dispositif a été industrialisé par l’entreprise. Cela démontre l’utilité de la méthode proposée pour la capitalisation et la transmission des connaissances tacites

Subjective evidence based ethnography: method and applications

Subjective Evidence Based Ethnography (SEBE) is a method designed to access subjective experience. It uses First Person Perspective (FPP) digital recordings as a basis for analytic Replay Interviews (RIW) with the participants. This triggers their memory and enables a detailed step by step understanding of activity: goals, subgoals, determinants of actions, decision-making processes, etc. This paper describes the technique and two applications. First, the analysis of professional practices for know-how transferring purposes in industry is illustrated with the analysis of nuclear power-plant operators’ gestures. This shows how SEBE enables modelling activity, describing good and bad practices, risky situations, and expert tacit knowledge. Second, the analysis of full days lived by Polish mothers taking care of their children is described, with a specific focus on how they manage their eating and drinking. This research has been done on a sub-sample of a large scale intervention designed to increase plain water drinking vs sweet beverages. It illustrates the interest of SEBE as an exploratory technique in complement to other more classic approaches such as questionnaires and behavioural diaries. It provides the detailed “how” of the effects that are measured at aggregate level by other techniques

Experiential learning and simulation-based training in Norwegian police education: examining body-worn video as a tool to encourage reflection

This research article aims to add to current knowledge on reflection, body-worn video, and police education. It examines the potential effects of an intervention which employed subcams (a type of body-worn video) and replay interviews of video footage to enhance experiential learning during an operative training course for Norwegian police students in their final year of study. Our investigation examines evaluation surveys for differences between an intervention and comparison group on reflection and experiential learning outcomes. Findings indicate that students in the intervention group self-reported more general learning outcomes from the course concerning decision-making and communication and that they could identify their own mistakes to a greater degree. They also reported more learning outcomes as measured by the number of statements written about what they learned and would change to improve their performance on three different simulations. Moreover, the content of these statements reflected the intervention as they involved communication and decision-making to a greater degree than students in the comparison group. Implications for the further use of body-worn video to encourage reflection and enhance experiential learning in professional police training and development are discussed

Comment guider les genèses instrumentales pour la prise en main du véhicule autonome ?

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Taste at first (person) sight: visual perspective modulates brain activity implicitly associated with viewing unhealthy but not healthy foods

Every day, people are exposed to images of appetizing foods that can lead to high-calorie intake and contribute to overweight and obesity. Research has documented that manipulating the visual perspective from which eating is viewed helps resist temptation by altering the appraisal of unhealthy foods. However, the neural basis of this effect has not yet been examined using neuroimaging methods. Moreover, it is not known whether the benefits of this strategy can be observed when people, especially overweight, are not explicitly asked to imagine themselves eating. Last, it remains to be investigated if visual perspective could be used to promote healthy foods. The present work manipulated camera angles and tested whether visual perspective modulates activity in brain regions associated with taste and reward processing while participants watch videos featuring a hand grasping (unhealthy or healthy) foods from a plate during functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI). The plate was filmed from the perspective of the participant (first-person perspective; 1PP), or from a frontal view as if watching someone else eating (third-person perspective; 3PP). Our findings reveal that merely viewing unhealthy food cues from a 1PP (vs. 3PP) increases activity in brain regions that underlie representations of rewarding (appetitive) experiences (amygdala) and food intake (superior parietal gyrus). Additionally, our results show that ventral striatal activity is positively correlated with body mass index (BMI) during exposure to unhealthy foods from a 1PP (vs. 3PP). These findings suggest that unhealthy foods should be promoted through third-person (video) images to weaken the reward associated with their simulated consumption, especially amongst overweight people. It appears however that, as such, manipulating visual perspective fails to enhance the perception of healthy foods. Their promotion thus requires complementary solutions

Studying manual work activity: a framework for analysis and training

This paper presents the methodological framework that we developed for collecting, studying and passing on tacit and explicit know-how embodied in professional gestures of expert workers. This framework is based upon the combination of an adaptation of a range of psychological theories and techniques: Activity Theory, the ‘perceived quality’ approach, subjective evidence-based ethnography, and verbal protocols. The application of the method, primarily based on the perspective of the expert, enables the building of a cognitive model of the professional gesture to be transmitted, by highlighting its key points. It leads to designing multimedia training products called MAP (Multimedia Platform for Apprenticeship) intended to “represent” and convey knowledge involved in the real-time performance of the expert’s gesture. The methodology was developed and applied to manual operators, in actual work and training settings of the biggest power French company. The practical aim of the study was to address an organizational issue of knowledge management, for professional training purposes, in order to bridge the gap of learning by mentoring between retiring experts and novices. The method has been recently industrialised by the company in whic

Risk assessment for subjective evidence-based ethnography applied in high risk environment: improved protocol

Subjective Evidence-Based Ethnography (SEBE) is a family of methods developed for investigation in social science based on subjective audio-video recordings with a miniature video-camera usually worn at eye-level (eye-tracking techniques are included). Facing a lack of tools for SEBE risk assessment when applied to high risk professional environments (e.g. anesthetists, aircraft pilots, nuclear reactor pilots), a protocol (version 1.1) was successfully developed and tested in nuclear industry with N1=59 participants and presented in a previous article. However, further cases were needed to demonstrate the robustness of the risk assessment protocol in other contexts. Further applications were thus undertaken with N2=75 participants from Air Force army, Police, Medicine and Nuclear industry during work activities lasting from 10 minutes to several hours. SEBE equipment was worn and the original risk assessment protocol was applied and/or discussed between participants and researchers for improvement. The protocol was enriched (version 2.3): 37% items were added. This illustrated the context sensitiveness of this sort of risk assessment. Limits of this new series of tests are discussed