Research School Network: Practice With Purpose

Practice is an essential part of the teaching process. In his book ​‘Peak: Secrets from the new science of expertise’ Anders Ericsson says:


​“Imagine what might be possible if we applied the techniques that have proved to be so effective in sports and music and chess to all the different types of learning that people do, from the education of schoolchildren to the training of doctors, engineers, pilots, business people, and workers of every sort. I believe that the dramatic improvements we have seen in those few fields over the past hundred years are achievable in pretty much every field if we apply the lessons that can be learned from studying the principles of effective practice.”


So what do we mean when we talk about practice? Practice is probably best described as utilising, applying, enacting, thinking about, writing about or speaking about new knowledge and skills, so that it can be consolidated or enhanced. The research evidence points towards two types of research:


1. Practice for fluency – so that we achieve automaticity
2. Purposeful practice – so that we practice at the outer reaches of our ability.

Practice is a tricky customer though. If we practise something badly, we’ll just get better at being bad, or if we just keep practising at a comfortable level, without any challenge, we’ll just stay at that level and never really improve:


​“Practice makes permanent” Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi, Practice Perfect.
​“Children learn what they do. Children need to encounter new material at least three times if they are going to learn it” Graham Nuthall, The Hidden Lives of Learners.
​“Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect” Vince Lombardi, American Football Legend.

So let’s delve into the research a bit deeper.


Retrieval Practice

Put very simply, retrieval practice is the act of having to retrieve something from your memory (often with the help of a cue). Recent research has shown that retrieval is critical for robust, durable, long-term learning. Every time a memory is retrieved, that memory becomes more accessible in the future. Retrieval also helps us create coherent and integrated mental representations of complex concepts, the kind of deep learning necessary to solve new problems and draw new inferences.


Teachers can mobilise this in their classrooms by asking a range of questions at the start of every lesson – some from last lesson, some from last week, some from last month and some from last term.

More here:

The Learning Scientists on Retrieval Practice.
A powerful way to improve learning and memory – Jeffrey Karpicke
RetrievalPractice.org


Spaced Practice

Spaced practice (or ​‘spacing’ or ​‘distributed practice’) involves repeatedly coming back to information that we are learning in various short sessions, spaced out over time, rather than cramming in a long intense period.

Ebbinghaus ran a limited study (on himself) where he taught himself nonsense syllables and then tested himself on them days after the initital exposure to them, recorded how many he remembered, reviewed them again and then repeated the process over time. This resulted in the now-quite-famous ​‘Ebbinghaus forgetting curve’. Essentially this suggested that spacing out the reviews, with an increasing gap between them, helped him to remember the syllables. This has been replicated more recently.

By allowing ourselves to forget and then having to retrieve that information from our memory, we are strengthening that memory. In the words of Daniel Willingham:

​“Memory is the residue of thought”

How can teachers mobilise this evidence?

1. Plan opportunities to revisit previously studied topics in lessons. You can read about how one maths teacher has done this here.

2. Set homeworks that ask students questions about what they have been doing recently, but also have sections on topics that have been studied previously.

3. Use low stake quizzes at the start of the lesson that require students to retrieve information from last lesson, last month and last term.

4. When encourage students to devise their own revision plan for your subject, make sure they space out the topics, leading up to the exam. A blank revision calendar will help with this.

5. Plan the curriculum so that you return to topics over time.

More here:

Learn how to study using spaced practice – The Learning scientists
Tips and tricks for spaced learning – Paul Kirschner & Mirjam Neelen
Improving students learning with effective learning techniques – Dunlosky et al
Making spaced practice count
The benefits of spaced practice in the classroom – Megan Smith

Purposeful Practice

Purposeful practice relies on small achievable, well defined steps that help you work your way towards meaningful improvement. These steps should take into account what you already know and/​or can do and push you, little by little, to improve and develop in this area.

In ​‘Peak’, Ericsson develops this idea in golf:

​“If you’re a weekend golfer and you want to decrease your handicap by five strokes, that’s fine for an overall purpose, but it is not a well-defined, specific goal that can be used effectively for your practice. Break it down and make a plan: What exactly do you need to do to slice five strokes off your handicap? One goal might be to increase the number of drives landing in the fairway. That’s a reasonably specific goal, but you need to break it down even more: What exactly will you do to increase the number of successful drives? You will need to figure out why so many of your drives are not landing in the fairway and address that by, for instance, working to reduce your tendency to hook the ball. How do you do that? An instructor can give you advice on how to change your swing motion in specific ways. And so on. The key thing is to take that general goal — get better — and turn it into something specific that you can work on with a realistic expectation of improvement.”

In ​‘Making Good Progress’Daisy Christodoulou develops this idea, in the context of school assessments:

​“For an assessment system to help support good teaching, not impede it, we need to accept that complex skills can be broken down into smaller pieces. As a result, many formative assessments will not look much like the final summative assessment and will not be able to be measured on the same scale.”


Overlearning

Cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham suggests that people overestimate how much they will remember and underestimate how much they will forget. As a result, most people stop studying too soon, whereas in fact we should continue to study beyond knowing something. A rule of thumb is to put in another 20% of the time it took to master the material.