Dan Willingham on overlearning

Practice Makes Perfect - But Only If You Practice Beyond the Point of Perfection

I've just found this link again for Samantha.

Question: Just how much should students practice what they learn? On the one hand, it seems obvious that practice is important. After all, "practice makes perfect." On the other hand, it seems just as obvious that practicing the same material again and again would be boring for students. How much practice is the right amount?

Answer: It is difficult to overstate the value of practice. For a new skill to become automatic or for new knowledge to become long-lasting, sustained practice, beyond the point of mastery, is necessary. This column summarizes why practice is so important and reviews the different effects of intense short-term practice versus sustained, long-term practice.

That students would benefit from practice might be deemed unsurprising. After all, doesn’t practice make perfect? The unexpected finding from cognitive science is that practice does not make perfect. Practice until you are perfect and you will be perfect only briefly. What’s necessary is sustained practice. By sustained practice I mean regular, ongoing review or use of the target material (e.g., regularly using new calculating skills to solve increasingly more complex math problems, reflecting on recently-learned historical material as one studies a subsequent history unit, taking regular quizzes or tests that draw on material learned earlier in the year). This kind of practice past the point of mastery is necessary to meet any of these three important goals of instruction: acquiring facts and knowledge, learning skills, or becoming an expert.

We've just come to this realization with Christopher: he is nowhere near "procedural fluency" with any kind of computation beyond his math facts.

Ed had been complaining that Christopher "doesn't know his math facts," which was ticking me off since I was there for many, many Saxon Fast Facts sheets; he certainly does know his math facts.

Turns out Ed doesn't know what the phrase "math facts" means; he was thinking "math facts" means "computation."

(question: Is this man living in the same house I'm living in?)

I had subliminally noticed that Christopher is too slow on computation, but of course I'm intensely focused on just getting him through the course in one piece. (I'm defining "one piece" as "grade goes back up to a B.") Also, I'm trying to write books.

So: blind spot.

Yesterday we got the ITBS results and - bingo. He's strong on everything in math except computation. (The computation test was hard. Lots of problems; very short time to work.)

math: 88th percentile
computation: 75th percentile

Eighty-eighth down to 75th: that seems like a huge difference to me.

Ed says when he works with Christopher he's still having to write out a division problem in order to divide a number by 2.

Obviously I let him drop out of KUMON way too soon.

I'm going to fix this problem with edhelper. (Susan & instructivist both like that site, iirc.) The KUMON sheets were too much, and were getting far too expensive since it's the same price every week no matter how many worksheets you do.


how to remember something forever

This is serendipity. I've found the passage I was searching for the other day:

Although practice takes on a different character for the longer-term, it is no less important. Studies show that if material is studied for one semester or one year, it will be retained adequately for perhaps a year after the last practice (Semb, Ellis, & Araujo, 1993), but most of it will be forgotten by the end of three or four years in the absence of further practice. If material is studied for three or four years, however, the learning may be retained for as long as 50 years after the last practice (Bahrick, 1984; Bahrick & Hall, 1991). There is some forgetting over the first five years, but after that, forgetting stops and the remainder will not be forgotten even if it is not practiced again. Researchers have examined a large number of variables that potentially could account for why research subjects forgot or failed to forget material, and they concluded that the key variable in very long-term memory was practice.*(see below *) Exactly what knowledge will be retained over the long-term has not been examined in detail, but it is reasonable to suppose that it is the material that overlaps multiple courses of study: Students who study American history for four years will retain the facts and themes that came up again and again in their history courses.

* It is likely relevant that there is not only more practice in this case, but that the practice is distributed across time rather than concentrated in a few months (see former column, "Allocating Student Study Time.")