Practice is Important for Learning - How we Practice may Also Be Important

I miss your heartbeat.  Uploaded to Flickr by digitalnoise

Wired.com recently ran an article called “Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning is Wrong.”  The article was popular and was re-posted by many different people interested in learning and education.  The article focused on an interview with Robert Bjork, a UCLA psychology professor and the Director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab.  

One of Bjork’s main themes was the importance of “interleaving,”  that is working on several skills at once rather than focusing on a single skill.  

“First, he told me, think about how you attack a pile of study material.

“People tend to try to learn in blocks,” Bjork said. “Mastering one thing before moving on to the next.”

Instead of doing that Bjork recommends interleaving. The strategy suggest that instead of spending an hour working on your tennis serve, you mix in a range of skills like backhands, volleys, overhead smashes, and footwork.

“This creates a sense of difficulty,” Bjork said. “And people tend not to notice the immediate effects of learning.”

Instead of making an appreciable leap forward with your serving ability after a session of focused practice, interleaving forces you to make nearly imperceptible steps forward with many skills. But over time, the sum of these small steps is much greater than the sum of the leaps you would have taken if you’d spent the same amount of time mastering each skill in its turn.”

Numerous studies support the positive effects of practicing different skills, rather than simply practicing a single skills then moving on.  


Interleaving (mixed) practice also works for learning in medicine
A paper in Advances in Health Sciences Education looked at the effect of mixed practice (interleaving) in learning to electrocardiogram (ECG) diagnosis.  


To diagnose an ECG, students have to be able to correctly identify the the features on the ECG and to know the rules for each cardiac diagnosis (for instance left ventricular hypertrophy).  

Traditionally, students have learned and practiced these diagnoses one at a time.  Once they had mastered a diagnosis, they moved on to a new one, with a new learning and practice cycle.  


Study Design - groups differ in timing of practice
The study used a 2 hour learning session for both groups.  Each of the groups got the same instruction on five different ECG diagnoses, but they differed in the timing and presentation of the practice materials.  
 

Control Group	Contrastive Practice
Topic 1 Instruction Practice Topic 2 Instruction Practice Topic 3 Instruction Practice Topic 4 Instruction Practice Topic 5 Instruction Practice	Topic 1 Instruction Topic 2 Instruction Topic 3 Instruction Topic 4 Instruction Topic 5 Instruction Topics 1-5 Mixed Practice  Students encouraged to compare and contrast patterns  across diagnoses.

Study outcomes - mixed practice works
Students were tested on a six-item diagnostic test.  The group receiving contrastive practice had an over 50% increase in accurate diagnoses (1.8 for the control group v. 2.8 for the contrastive practice group).



Hatala, R.M., Brooks, L.R., and Norman, G.R. (2003).  Practice makes perfect: The critical role of mixed practice in the acquisition of ECG interpretation skills.  Advances in Health Science Education, 8:17, 17-26.