5 Science-based Techniques to Help Your Students Master Any Hard Skill

Ladies & gents, my name is?Brandon Stover , and I’m the founder of?Plato University . Welcome to Theory into Action.

Theory into Action is designed to help you turn your wisdom into actionable education. Learn how to create online courses, design learning experiences, and build educational programs so your knowledge can impact thousands of people.

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In my previous two videos, I went over techniques that were good in the Explore stage, and then techniques that were good in the Engage stage of our three phases of learning .

The five active learning techniques that we're going to cover today are perfect for the Execute phase. This is where you're focusing on mastery, taking everything you learned in the foundational concepts and in your practice, and now really trying to master those skills, learning all of the steps and being able to apply them, creating something new in the world.

Learning Technique 1: Proceduralization

What is Proceduralization?

Proceduralization is the process of converting declarative knowledge into automatic unconscious procedural knowledge. Turning something from declarative learning to procedural learning is often going through a set of procedures that becomes easier to recall with each practice of the procedure.

When you're learning, you're depositing links on neurons into long-term memory. Links can be deposited in the quick to learn declarative learning system, closely integrated with working memory. So you're mostly conscious of what you're doing. The second way to deposit links is through the procedural system which is stored in another part of the brain.

Why it matters: Turning knowledge into easily executed procedures allows you to think quickly, efficiently, and effortlessly, freeing your working memory to focus on hard problems.

What does the science say?

Procedural and declarative systems work together in most kinds of learning, including writing language, math, music, and everything in between, according to research. For many decades, researchers thought procedural learning only involved motor skills but then researchers have realized that the procedural system was also involved in habits.

The relationship between declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge looks like this:

• Declarative knowledge often needs to know each step and learn it individually.
• As you begin learning, you're going to focus intently on each step that you're learning, but then these steps become a pattern, requiring only the initial cue to need remembering.
• Then knowledge is proceduralized, being able to perform those links without thinking about them, only remembering that first cue in order to pull out those links from long-term memory.

Procedural memories are typically accessed by the appropriate trigger conditions.

Why should you use Proceduralization?

Turning your learning into procedures will help you develop habits and intuition to perform tasks effortlessly and quickly. Creating well-developed links in your procedural system allows you to be lightening quick, even in stressful situations. The speed and smooth confidence of the procedural system, coupled with the flexibility of the declarative system can really accelerate your learning.

How do you use Proceduralization?

The general process of proceduralization is:

1. Learn something through declarative knowledge by focusing intently on the skill your learning, moving your learning from working memory to long-term memory.
2. Start recognizing patterns and repeatable steps within the skill.
3. Engage in deliberate practice until those steps become an automatic habit for you.

Note: When you go through this process, not all skills we learn are incompletely proceduralized. You may be able to do some of them automatically, but other parts require you to actively think about them. But this will create an interesting mix of knowledge with some things retained, quite stably over long periods of time and other susceptible to being forgotten.

Example strategies for proceduralization:

• Ensure that a certain amount of knowledge is completely proceduralized before practicing the entire skill as a whole.
• Proceduralize some skills which will serve as cues or access points for other parts of your knowledge.
• In math or science,?internalize key exemplar problems by working out the problems yourself, listening to intuition, then checking your answer against to worked out solution.
• In learning a foreign language, use retrieval practice, spaced repetition, and interleaving in order to make speaking that language second nature.
• In writing or artistic skills using the Benjamin Franklin Technique, which requires looking at other people's styles and practicing those styles until they are proceduralized.

Learning Technique 2:Overlearning

Overlearning is the idea of practicing beyond perfect. Additional practice beyond what is required to perform adequately can increase the length of time that memories are stored.

The basic idea of this is that you're learning a certain skill and practicing it to the point that you can do it correctly.

Why it matters: Practice makes perfect. Overlearning makes masters. Spending that extra time learning a skill beyond proficiency makes performing it second nature to you.

What does the science say?

Overlearning can be an effective method of studying for short-term returns.

Traditional experiments have shown that the effectiveness of overlearning might be quite short, really helping in the first week or two of recalling. Experiments are done with activities like assembling a rifle or going through an emergency checklist, allowing the participant to practice that skill enough times till they can do it correctly. Subjects are allowed different amounts of overlearning or practice that continues after the first correct application. Since subjects are already doing the skill correctly, performance doesn't necessarily improve past this point but the overlearning can extend the durability of the memories.

However, if you're able to combine overlearning with other techniques , like spaced repetition, interleaving and proceduralization, retention can be increased in for long term memory.

Why should you use Overlearning?

If you can apply overlearning with other techniques, skills will be more easily linked into long term memory.

How do you use Overlearning?

The first core practice of overlearning is:

• Practicing a skill continuously and refining the core elements, specifically the foundations of the skill that do not change over time.
• Best done through immersion or working on extensive projects in new contexts after the initial learning phase has been completed.

The second strategy of overlearning is:

• Doing advanced practice, going one level above a certain set of skills, so that the core parts of the lower level skills are overlearned as one applies them in more difficult contexts.

When applying overlearning use other techniques like spaced repetition and interleaving that repetition in different contexts.

• Far transfer occurs when information learned in one context is retrieved and applied in a very different context.
• Overlearning key principles that underlie the relevant material with key examples in different contexts helps you to understand when that knowledge should be applied.

Try using different material to help you practice the same concepts, learning those concepts from as many different perspectives as possible to try and gain complete understanding.

• The more you approach something from different perspectives, the better, more holistic understanding you'll have of it.
• With repeated and increasingly detailed exposure, your brain is able to figure out where the details fit into the bigger picture.
• This practice also demonstrates that it's okay to not understand something the very first time we.

Learning Technique 3: Experimenting

When you're doing an experiment, you're exploring applications of skills outside of the predetermined ways you originally learned those skills.

There are 3 types of learning experiments:

• Experimenting with learning resources: discovering the right guides and resources that are going to work for best for you for learning.
• Experimenting with technique: learning all the subtopics or specialties of a skill in order to become a master of the broader skillset.
• Experimenting with style: studying other master's styles, taking the foundational ways of performing a skill, and adding your unique twist to create a new style.

Why it matters: As you approach mastery, it becomes more difficult to continue progress with your learning. Experiments allow you to practice a skill in novel ways.

What does the science say?

As a skill develops, it's often no longer enough to simply follow the example of others. You need to experiment and find your own path. There dozens of teachers and resources for beginners, but there are almost zero for those reaching master levels. Abilities are more likely to stagnate after you've mastered the basics. Not only must you learn to solve problems you couldn't before, you must unlearn stale and ineffective approaches for solving those problems.

The master not only knows how to solve a problem, but knows the very best way to solve the problem. The best way to apply his knowledge in an efficient and clean manner. Many skills reward not only proficiency of applying the skill, but also originality.

Why should you use Experimenting?

By creating your own experiments, you lead yourself down a path of mastery that sets you apart from everyone else who knows this skill. This is going to make you unique and more valuable.

How do you use Experimenting?

There are five tactics that you can use to start running experiments.

Copy, then create: copying the work of another master, and then using that to create your own work or own application of that.

• Copying simplifies the problem of experimentation somewhat because it gives you a starting point for making decisions.
• When you're attempting to emulate or copy another work, you have to deconstruct it and understand why it works.

Compare methods side-by-side: trying two different approaches and varying only a single condition to see what the impact is.

• With this tactic you gain an understanding of what works and which methods are more suited for your personal style.
• You will get much better information about which method works best if you limit the variation to only one factor,.
• Solving problems multiple ways or applying different solution styles to problems, will increase your breadth of expertise.

Introducing new constraints: introducing new constraints that make the old methods impossible to use.

• This tactic shakes up the way you solve problems and apply a skill to avoid becoming dogmatic in only applying the skill in one way.

Creating a hybrid of unrelated skills: combine two unrelated skills to create a unique skillset.

• For many areas in life, combining two skills that don't necessarily overlap can bring a distinct advantage that those who specialize in only one of those skills wouldn't have.

Exploring the extremes: push the boundaries of what other people have done with this skill.

• Pushing to an extreme allows you to search the space of possibilities more effectively while also giving you a broader range of experience.

Learning Technique 4: Generation Effect

The Generation Effect is the idea of creating something new which allows you to remember things better by actively engaging with the information and creating your own version of it.

Scientists described it as the phenomenon where information is better remembered if it is actively created from one's own mind, rather than simply reading it in a passive way.

Why it matters: The real masters of any skill are not only able to understand and apply that skill, but also able to generate entirely new ways of using a skill.

What does the science say?

To this day, researchers are still not quite sure how the generation effect actually works.

Some think creating your own material based on what you want to learn may activate your semantic memory, which is the general world knowledge such as facts, ideas, and concepts. The learning benefits of actively constructing knowledge has been noted in several areas, including mathematics, reading comprehension and trivia questions.

Others think that the process of generating content may initiate some particular encoding processes that do not happen when simply reading. Generating answers increases the likelihood that you will recall or recognize information later when compared to passive activities, such as reading . Generative activities encourage learners to use methods during learning or encoding that can be invoked during retrieval of the learned information.

Another theory is that actively manipulating new information may create relationships between each item, facilitating the retrieval of information when it’s needed. Learners are more likely to retain information when asked to produce or generate an answer compared to having that same information provided to them.

Whatever the origin of the Generation Effect, it has been shown to help a lot when it comes to learning and remembering information..

Why should you use the Generation Effect?

You will build your muscle of actually applying the skills that you're learning by recalling it from memory and generating new things in the real world.

Every great inventor, thinker, or entrepreneur, has the ability to create new things from all the material that they know.

How do you use the Generation Effect?

When solving problems:

• Trying solving problems before looking over the material that you learned.
• To take this a step further, approach problems you've never seen before and try to solve them based on the different concepts and information that are in your memory.
• The act of engaging in the problem solving process, hugely enhances our understanding of recall. This is even true. If we don't manage to get the correct answer.

Other ways you can apply the generation technique is by:

• Reading half a chapter and start asking yourself questions about what you're reading, trying to develop a concept and generate the idea before you finish reading the text.
• Watching a video a quarter or halfway through and generate what you think will happen next.
• After you're done reading a blog post, go to another tab or open your notebook and try and write out a few bullet points about the content from your memory.
• If you're doing something like learning how to code, try to read a tutorial in a focused way and then apply what you learned without looking at the tutorial.
• Or when you're trying to memorize anything, ask someone to quiz you so you can start generating your own answers on those concepts.
• Teach the material to someone else.

Speaking of which…

Learning Technique 5: Teaching

Teaching requires us to imagine new and alternative ways to understand a subject and then take those understandings and create simpler, more creative ways to transmit that to other people.

Why it matters: The ultimate test of a master is if they are able to pass that knowledge on to someone else. It feels impossible to teach another if you don't fully understand a concept.

What does the science say?

Teaching others is an incredible motivator. The moment we commit to teaching something to someone else, we're more compelled to improve our own understanding of it.

Teaching a subject to someone who knows less than we do presents unique challenges and opportunities for us as learners, because other people learn in different ways. This process of dissecting a subject well enough to explain it results in a much deeper understanding among those who teach.

When we teach other people we're presented with very unique questions and these questions may be sometimes far outside our own scope of understanding, forcing us to fill our knowledge gaps. We're actively recalling information and being tested all the time by the people that we're teaching. You are recruiting other people to look at the holes in your knowledge. And when they find these holes, they alert you to the areas you should go back and study.

Why should you use Teaching?

You avoid the the Dunning Kruger effect , which occurs when someone with inadequate understanding of a subject, nonetheless believes he or she possesses more knowledge about the subject than the people who actually do. Questions asked by those your teaching they require explanations that dig into the details of a subject into those areas that you don't fully understand yet. It's forces you to prove things yourself in order to gain a deeper understanding because you went through the process yourself, not just taking other people's proof at face value.

How do you use Teaching?

Using the Feynman Technique:

1. Choose a concept you wish to learn about.
2. Pretend you are teaching it to a child—a sixth-grader, specifically. Write your explanation down or say it out loud.
3. Identify any gaps in your understanding that might show up when you try to simplify the concept; go back to the source material to find the information you need.
4. Review and simplify your explanation again.
5. Test it out by teaching someone else

If you're teaching a concept, ask yourself, how would you convey the idea to somebody who has never heard of it before.

If you're teaching a problem, explain how to solve it and crucially why that solution procedure makes sense to you.

Strategies for using this:

• When you don't understand something at all, try going back and forth between your explanation and the one that's in a book or learning resource.
• When solving a difficult problem, solve the problem step by step while generating an explanation for why you took that step and solved it that way.
• When wanting a full understanding of a topic, generate illustrative examples, analogies, or visualizations that would make the idea comprehensible to complete novices.

Struggling to Decide Where To Use These?

Now these active learning techniques will supercharge your ability and your students' ability to become smarter, remember more, and master any skills.

But where do you use them? How do you integrate them into your courses?

So message me and let's schedule a free call together.

I'll help you work through your ideas and develop a strategy So you can use these techniques inside your course.

No hard sells, if you'd like my help implementing that strategy, I'd be happy to do so. Otherwise your free to take that plan and run with. What I care is that either way we are helping your students succeed.

So message me and let me help you to turn your wisdom into actionable education.

Let's build something great together.