Hi Jennifer,
I'm pretty sure that Ken has nailed the main reason - institutional (read "organizational cultural") bias / history. Evaluations such as what you are talking about are, strangely enough, rather tricky to do. It's pretty easy to ask "Did the gun fire" six months later after a mission. It's much harder to evaluate cultural training six months later.Originally Posted by jenniferro10
Now, having said that, it is pretty easy to evaluate the spectacular failures of cultural training, such as the one you mentioned. But how about successes? With languages, some evaluation is possible or, rather, testing for language competencies is possible. That does not necessarily mean that the language can be used in the field (check out TOEFL scores vs the actual ability to network in a f2f setting).
"Cultural training" is even worse. All too often, it is 1-3 hours sandwiched in during the "real" stuff. Even if the students want more, they often don't have the time for more. All too often, the courses are canned - designed by a committee, delivered by anyone and, as the Bard opined, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". In the rare cases where you have a top notch instructor who knows the material well and is great at it (Paula Holmes-Eber comes to mind, but I know of others), you still have that institutional time limit.
Should there be a feedback loop to help improve the training? Yup, there should. The problem, of course, is that that type of training is often not evaluable by the students until after they have gone in the field, so such an evaluation often breaks down into a popularity contest in the infotainment field.
BTW, I'm not trying to be egregiously negative here. I'm just pointing out that there are some problems inherent in the evaluation process when you take subject matter that should be taught as education, not training, and attempt to apply evaluation criteria that were designed for training.
Cheers,
Marc
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