The impact of training methods on learning curve effects

Abstract

Nowadays, the increasing competitiveness inside the markets has ended up in a huge necessity by companies to improve and accelerate the development of their products. Trying to find the most efficient processes is essential to make good product performance and remain and even increase their market share. One essential task to improve the product development process is the one related to the learning process by the operators. Finding the right learning time with accurate methods is essential to achieve a high degree of efficiency while developing the product. Therefore, in this thesis some theoretical and practical approach is going to be presented about which are the main determinant factors of a learning process. That task is going to be performed by defining the famous learning curves, the graphical representation of the whole learning process, and also studying and applying some statistical tools like t-Test and ANOVA, needed to analyse these curves. This work has been carried out by doing a literature review of the topic in order to define the theoretical framework, and by studying a practical case of a learning process. This case was about doing 5 experiments that consist on the assembly of a clock by people of different cultures (Chinese and European) and applying different methods depending on the experiment. With these experiments both variables (culture and teaching methods) were defined and analysed with statistical tools in order to see if they were significant factors that affect on the learning process or not. As a result this thesis defines the learning curves of all the experiments and analyses the data acquired in the experiments with the help of the information gathered in the literature review. It has been found that almost all of the different teaching methods has their own qualities and his own weakness points. The thing is that it hasn’t been found one method better in all the aspects than the others, every one is good in some points and because are good in some aspects probably for that same reason are not that good in other aspects. So it can be concluded that the teaching method is relevant in order to obtain different learning curves. As well it has been compared the learning curves for each different experiment I has been also done a culture comparison where it can be found that the cultures is significant in order to obtain different results.