Build Practice

If reading, re-reading, marking & highlighting portions, taking notes & summarizing, is the way that you are learning then it is very typical but unfortunately not the most beneficial in terms of the effect on long-term retention and performance on various tests.

But this also means that there is scope for improvement as there are better alternatives available which can be applied. Given the recent advances in technology, they have become much easier to implement as well- either by the teacher or by the student himself.

Why don’t many students consistently use effective techniques?

One possibility is that students are not instructed about which techniques are effective or how to use them effectively during formal schooling.

Part of the problem may be that teachers themselves are not told adequately about the efficacy of various learning techniques, which techniques work best and how to train students to use them.

A second problem may be that a premium is placed on teaching students content and critical-thinking skills, whereas less time is spent teaching students to develop effective techniques and strategies to guide learning.

Prove vs Improve

“The motivation to prove one’s competence is immaterial without the motivation to improve one’s competence. A focus on learning (a learning orientation) enhances performance whereas a focus on performance (performance orientation) can lower performance.”

Almost every definition of assessment has a component related to improvement in student’s learning (just google 'assessment' and verify!) and still most students would prefer to take as few tests as possible, given that their experience with testing involves high-stakes summative assessments that are administered to evaluate learning (prove performance) rather than to improve learning.

This view of testing overshadows the fact that testing also improves learning. Since the study by Abbott (1909), more than 100 years of research has yielded several hundred experiments showing that practice testing enhances learning and retention. Edward Thorndike recommended as far back as 1906 that “the active recall of a fact from within is, as a rule, better than its impression from without”. Research on practice testing since then has supported Thorndike’s recommendation by demonstrating the benefits of practice testing.

Summative vs Practice testing

Practice testing is different from summative assessments that are administered by an instructor in class. Practice testing is completed as a low-stakes or no-stakes practice or learning activity and includes any form of testing that students would be able to engage in even on their own. For example, practice testing could involve practising recall of target information via the use of flashcards, completing practice problems or questions included at the end of textbook chapters, or completing practice tests included in the electronic supplemental materials that increasingly accompany textbooks.

Not all practice is same

Students are expected to learn content from many different subtopics or problems of many different kinds. For example, students in a geometry course learn various formulas for computing surface area and volume of solids. An intuitive approach involves blocking study or practice, such that all content from one subtopic is studied or all problems of one type are practised before the student moves on to the next set of material. In contrast, recent research has begun to explore interleaved practice, in which students alternate their practice of different kinds of items or problems.

Assuming that there are 4 types of tutorials related to solids (cube, cone, sphere, cylinder) and practice problems related to each of them. Students in a blocked practice group first read a tutorial on finding the volume of a given solid, immediately followed by some practice problems for that kind of solid. Practice solving volumes for a given solid is then followed by the tutorial and practice problems for the next kind of solid, and so on till all 4 are covered.

Students in an interleaved-practice group first read all four tutorials and then complete all the practice problems, with the constraint that every set of four consecutive problems included one problem for each of the four kinds of solids.

Comparative study

A well-designed experiment with the above two types of practice found that during practice, performance was better with blocked practice than interleaved practice, but this advantage dramatically reversed on the delayed test, such that interleaved practice boosted accuracy by 43%.

During the delayed test, there are two types of error. Fabrication errors involve cases in which students use a formula that was not originally taught whereas discrimination errors involve cases in which students use one of the formulas that had been practised but was not appropriate for a given problem. The two groups did not differ in fabrication errors, but discrimination errors were more common after blocked practice than after interleaved practised. Students who received interleaved practice were better at discriminating among the kinds of problems and consistently applied the correct formula to each one.

How do we explain the differences?

One explanation is that when solving for the volume of one kind of solid (e.g., a cube), during interleaved practice, the solution method used for the immediately prior problem involving a different kind of solid (e.g., a spheroid) was still in working memory and hence encouraged a comparison of the two problems and their different formulas.

Another explanation is, for blocked practice, the information relevant to completing a task resides in working memory; hence, participants don’t have to retrieve the solution. So, if a student completes a block of problems solving for volumes of cubes, the solution to each new problem will be readily available from working memory. By contrast, for interleaved practice, when the next type of problem is presented, the solution method for it must be retrieved from long-term memory. So, if a student has just solved for the volume of a cube and then must solve for the volume of a spheroid, he must retrieve the formula for spheroids from memory. Such practice testing boosts memory for the retrieved information.

Do we need to maintain a balance?

In an experiment, practice was either blocked, interleaved, or first blocked and then interleaved. Increases in accuracy from the pre-practice test to the post-practice test occurred only after blocked and blocked-plus-interleaved practice, and, these benefits were largely shown only for students with low prior knowledge. This outcome supports the hypothesis that interleaved practice may be most beneficial only after a certain level of competency has been achieved using blocked practice with an individual concept or problem type.

How much initial practice is enough?

Students with low skill levels or students learning to solve more difficult tasks will require more blocked practice before interleaving begins. Adaptive testing can be a really good indicator of when to start interleaved practice. Blocking may be required initially, but once the student has reached the desired level then incremental benefits are to be expected from adopting interleaving.

From ineffective to effective strategies

Students most often endorse the use of re-reading and highlighting, two strategies with relatively low utility. Nevertheless, some students do report using practice testing, and these students appear to benefit from its use. In experiments frequency of students’ reported use of practice-testing was significantly correlated with their performance on a final exam. Given that practice testing is relatively easy to use, students who do not currently use this technique should be able to incorporate it into their study routine.

Role of teachers

Beyond training students to use these techniques, teachers could also incorporate some of them into their lesson plans. For instance, when beginning a new section of a unit, a teacher could begin with a practice test (with feedback) on the most important ideas from the previous section. When students are practising problems from a unit on mathematics, recently studied problems could be interleaved with related problems from previous units. When introducing key concepts or facts in class, teachers could engage students in explanatory questioning by prompting them to consider how the information is new to them, how it relates to what they already know, or why it might be true.

Even homework assignments could be designed to take advantage of many of these techniques. Teachers could implement a technique to help students learn, regardless of whether students are themselves aware that a particular technique is being used.

This is in continuation with the previous piece (3 Basic Goals of a Teacher, 
and Assessments)

I have been accumulating quite a bit of domain knowledge and now I think it is 
time to share. something in the series. more to come...

Neeraj