By Kathryn Fisher, Pascal Haegeli, and Patrick Mair
This article initially appeared in The Avalanche Journal, Volume 130, summer 2022
IN THE WINTER OF 2020, the Simon Fraser University Avalanche Research Program conducted an online survey to test if incorporating interactive components into the avalanche bulletin could increase its use as an educational tool. We wanted to provide data-driven advice to help avalanche warning services find ways to offer timely and reliable feedback to recreationists planning backcountry travel routes in avalanche terrain. We also wanted to test if characteristics of recreationists, such as their level of avalanche education, would impact how they responded to interactive elements in the bulletin.
This article provides a brief summary of the main results of the study and their implications for avalanche warning services. For a full description of the methods and results, please refer to the open-access publication in the Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism (Fisher, Haegeli, and Mair, 2022).
THE SURVEY
In the survey, we presented users with a hypothetical avalanche bulletin and three potential travel routes on a custom-built terrain map (Fig. 1). We asked participants to study the avalanche bulletin information and then rank the three routes according to their exposure to the avalanche problems in the bulletin. After completing two route-ranking exercises, we divided participants into three groups that received different learning interventions. One group had the opportunity to reflect on the exercises by describing how they ranked the routes. The other two groups viewed one of two levels of feedback on their responses to the exercises. The first feedback level simply showed participants the correct exposure ranking of the routes but gave no details. The second level showed the correct rankings as well as detailed notes explaining the rationale for the rankings. We then asked all participants to complete two more route-ranking exercises to explore the impact of the learning interventions.
As part of the analysis, we determined which participants were actively engaging with the learning interventions. This was important to establish so we could better understand any subsequent trends in how the learning interventions were used. The level of engagement with the learning activities depended on the type of learning intervention and how many mistakes a participant made on the first two route-ranking exercises.
Participants who completed the first two ranking exercises correctly tended to engage more with the reflection intervention, while users who made mistakes tended to engage more with the interventions that provided feedback. These results makes sense as users who were successful at the tasks were able to articulate a coherent thought process, while users who made mistakes had the opportunity to learn about their errors. This key difference in engagement demonstrates that if feedback is provided, users who need the feedback will be willing to engage with it.
Interestingly, the level of avalanche training and bulletin user type did not predict how engaged participants were with the learning interventions. This shows the activities can be engaging to participants regardless of other factors that typically explain their bulletin use. We interpret this to mean that learning interventions can reach a broad audience of bulletin users.
Next, we determined whether the learning interventions were successful at helping participants to better apply the bulletin information in a route ranking exercise. While the feedback interventions did produce positive change in participants’ performance, the reflection exercise did not have an effect. However, the increased success was dependent on participants engaging with the feedback interventions. The more engaged they were, the bigger the improvement.
Taken together, these results show that the feedback options in this study can increase the ability of users to apply the bulletin information under certain conditions. The feedback options are most beneficial for users who were previously applying the information incorrectly and were motivated to engage with both the exercises and the feedback. Providing only the answers resulted in an improvement among participants with a high level of engagement and providing the answers including explanations produced improvements among participants with both medium and high engagements. Curious readers can find the full details of the results in Fisher, Haegeli and Mair (2022).
RECOMMENDATIONS
Avalanche bulletins are the primary source of avalanche hazard information for winter recreationists and include information that changes daily. Ensuring recreationists understand the presented information in these bulletins is therefore of utmost importance to their backcountry safety. We interpret our results as evidence that recreationists crave additional practice opportunities and feedback on applying bulletin information from trusted professionals. Avalanche warning services should therefore consider integrating application exercises into daily avalanche bulletins to give users a chance to assess their understanding. An optional application exercise with feedback to check user understanding of the daily conditions could be integrated within the homepage of the avalanche bulletin website or included as a link that interested users can follow.
While recreationists typically take one or two avalanche awareness courses in their backcountry career, integrating such exercises directly into the bulletin takes advantage of recreationists’ frequent interaction with the product and provides them with just-in-time education when they use the bulletin for personal trip planning. Enhancing bulletins this way will turn them from pure condition reports into a critical component of the overall avalanche awareness education system.
As this study only represents a one-time intervention, we were unable to determine if repeated interventions would lead to stronger educational benefits over time or, conversely, if participants’ familiarity with the exercise would lead them into overconfidence or complacency in attempting the exercises. However, the integration of condition-dependent daily exercises for users to check their understanding of the bulletin could help to answer these questions and provide avalanche warning services with a useful continuous source of information on bulletin users’ skill level and how they interpret the bulletin information. The gained insight could provide valuable information for future bulletin improvements and could also be used to develop target educational initiatives if certain combinations of problem conditions are repeatedly misunderstood.
We believe that these are exciting opportunities for making avalanche bulletins more effective and taking avalanche awareness among our growing and increasingly diverse community to the next level.
SOURCE
Fisher, Haegeli, and Mair. (2022). Exploring the avalanche bulletin as an avenue for continuing education by including learning interventions. Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism, 37, 100472. doi: 10.1016/j.jort.2021.100472. Available at www.avalancheresearch.ca/pubs/2022_fisher_learning.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KATHRYN FISHER holds a bachelor’s degree in Integrated Science from the University of British Columbia, and a master’s degree in Resource and Environmental Management from Simon Fraser University. Her master’s research centred on improvements to safety messaging in public avalanche forecasts. She currently works for the Canadian forest service using forest carbon models to estimate the greenhouse gas emissions balance of Canadian forests.
