22-03-2014, 02:23 PM
Learning a skill
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Practice, practice, practice
Practice is the key to mastering a skill. One of the critical aspects is assuredly the
fact that, with practice, the demands on your attention get smaller and smaller.
Interestingly (and probably against common sense), there appears to be no mental
limit to the improvement you gain from practice. Your physical condition limits how
much improvement you can make to a practical skill (although, in practice, few
people probably ever approach these limits), but a cognitive skill will continue to
improve as long as you keep practicing. One long-ago researcher had two people
perform 10,000 mental addition problems, and they kept on increasing their speed to
the end.
How to get the most out of your practice
While practice is the key, there are some actions we can take to ensure we get the
most value out of our practice:
• Learn from specific examples rather than abstract rules
• Provide feedback while the action is active in memory (i.e., immediately). Try
again while the feedback is active in memory.
• Practice a skill with subtle variations (such as varying the force of your pitch, or
the distance you are throwing) rather than trying to repeat your action
exactly.
• Space your practice (maths textbooks, for example, tend to put similar
exercises together, but in fact they would be better spaced out).
• Allow for interference with similar skills: if a new skill contains steps that are
antagonistic to steps contained in an already mastered skill, that new skill will
be much harder to learn (e.g., when I changed keyboards, the buttons for
page up, page down, insert, etc, had been put in a different order — the
conflict between the old habit and the new pattern made learning the new
pattern harder than it would have been if I had never had a keyboard before).
The existing skill may also be badly affected.
Micro-distribution practice
What about practice over much shorter intervals? Say you are learning vocabulary in
a foreign language - is it better to repeat a word twice in rapid succession, or to
space out the repetitions?
On the basis of the distribution principle, the answer is clear. Go through your list
once, then repeat it. That way, every item will be maximally distant from its own
repetition. But the distribution principle isn't the only memory principle at work here.
The other principle is that of generation - that if you produce the word for yourself,
this will strengthen the connection better than having the word given to you. And
your likelihood of being able to successfully recall the word is greater if you test it
earlier.
So you have two opposing principles at work here: one says maximize the time
between repetitions, the other says minimize it. Which wins? Well, neither. They're
both at work, so you need to take both into account, like this:
the first time, test a new word after only a brief interval (your own experience
is best here, to tell you what length of interval is best for you)
on successive recalls, gradually increase the interval (your aim is to find the
maximum interval at which you can reliably recall the word)
if you fail to recall the word, shorten the interval; if you succeed, lengthen it