ABSTRACT
Adult learning is often motivated by the need to learn how to perform complex tasks that are important to carrying out one's job. In some cases, the procedures that must be learned to perform these tasks can be defined as a specific sequence of actions. In other cases, a procedure can be thought of instead as a network of conditional branchings that associate sets of actions that can be performed to accomplish the task goal in a variety of contexts. And in some cases, tasks are so complex that they cannot be taught in terms of predefined observations and actions, but must instead be represented as a set of strategies, tactics, and heuristics that are sufficiently abstract that they can be applied to new circumstances that cannot be anticipated by the developers of training materials.
