My thinking connects to some points written by Kim and Loretta. Kim mentioned the importance of planning and environmental structuring in helping people to learn behaviors. I think her final statement hit the nail on the head. The environment is critical whether is it animal trainers, teachers or physical therapists, structuring an environment to support training and thus learning is crucial to success. As I read this, I thought about the challenge physical therapists struggle with, in getting people to transition the behaviors learned in therapy to the home environment. Which brought me to Loretta’s post, on self-efficacy and the four sources of information that contribute to self-efficacy.
The idea of performance accomplishments caught my eye. Loretta spoke of being able to get to the advanced trails and building up her self-efficacy for skiing through advancing to harder trails. No doubt was she to go again she would likely have an increased self-efficacy and may even start on a blue trail rather than a green. But what about when the environment is different. When her performance accomplishments don’t fit the new environment, yet she doesn’t see the misalignment. I saw this because (not to be dire), where I grew up skiing about 3 people died every year because they ski on trails that were well beyond their ability level. [for some reference where Loretta went skiing has a vertical drop of 300 feet, and the longest trail is .3 of a mile, where I grew up skiing has a vertical drop of 3,500 feet and the longest trail is 2.1 miles] A blue trail in one place is not the same as a blue trail in another. Thus their self-efficacy is misaligned with the situation, their performance accomplishments steer them wrong, and it is possible to end up badly hurt, or worse.
I feel that something similar could happen with physical therapy or even classrooms. What someone feels efficacious to do in one environment (i.e., the student support classroom, or the PT therapy room), may not actually be the same in a different environment (i.e., the classroom, or home environment). This makes me think about transferring behaviors to new situations and the potential it has to go wrong and cause a backslide. If you end up skiing a blue trail, that is much too hard for you, when previously you believed you could ski black diamonds, you might lose some of that efficacy and give up. Similarly, if you try to do something at home that you did under the guidance of your therapist and cannot do it, you may feel frustrated, and believe you cannot do it at all.
I don’t recall much in Sutherland’s book about transferring behaviors, but I am curious about the role of training, environment, and self-efficacy (particularly performance accomplishments) in behavioral transfer. What can be done to support behavior transfer without a loss of self-efficacy?
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