MaST and Dr Peter Honey teamed up on the first day of HRD Week to launch a new learning questionnaire. The short set of just ten questions has been devised in order to give the learner a learning health check. Everyone who completes the questionnaire - and anyone who missed the seminar can do so at stand 930 - will receive feedback next week once MaST has had a chance to analyse the results.

The results will benchmark individual respondents against everyone else who completed the questionnaire and will give tips for improving their learning health. Honey and Mark Mercer of MaST presented an informative and participative looking at conscious learning and unconscious learning. After establishing that conscious learning was better in terms of understanding what had been learnt, retaining it and being able to explain it, Honey and Mercer went on to explore ways of making sure learners are engaged during the learning process. Honey explained that, in addition to working through the learning cycle, asking how learning was achieved allows the learner to get more out of the process. Refreshingly, death by PowerPoint was abandoned at the start of the presentation in favour of large paper clouds on which key points were written.

These were displayed at appropriate moments by Honey and Mercer to an indulgent audience. The seminar entitled People are built to learn – or are they? was very well attended. All the seats were taken and the audience stood several deep around the edges. It was clearly one of the highlights of the day. Mangmnet Development

http://www.mast.co.uk