Are You (Unconsciously) Choosing Less-Effective Practice Strategies?

When my kids were in elementary school, studying for tests was pretty straightforward. Sure, they had to put in the time, but the teachers made it pretty clear what exactly they needed to study.

In middle school, the teachers started to become a little more hands-off.

And once they reached high school (and beyond), not only did they have to think more independently about what to study, but they also had to make decisions about how to study.

I think musicians go through a similar experience in the evolution of practicing one’s instrument.

Picking practice strategies

When we’re younger, it’s a lot clearer what to practice and how. We can organize practice activities in terms of units of time, or numbers of repetitions, and identify clear goals.

But as we get older, there are not only more notes to learn and more complex issues to problem-solve, but the limits of time start to become much more apparent too.

So our ability to choose the most effective practice techniques for any given issue or practice session becomes a really important factor in making the most of your time.

But how should we choose? Like, how can we tell if we’re using the most effective approach to practice at any given moment?

Because sometimes it can seem like we’re having a great practice day and improving by leaps and bounds, only to discover the next day, that we sound as if we didn’t practice at all the day before.

And on other days, it feels like we’re getting nowhere, but the next day, we somehow sound way better.

What gives?

A study!

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh (Kirk-Johnson, Galla, & Fraundorf, 2019) were curious to see if they could gain some insights into why learners choose the study strategies they do – and why they often favor less-effective strategies.

In one study, participants were asked to practice discriminating between different types of birds using either a blockedstudy schedule or an interleaved study schedule.

(In case these terms don’t ring a bell, blocked practice means studying or practicing one topic or skill/passage/excerpt repeatedly in a single chunk of time before moving on to the next thing. Interleaved practice means alternating between different topics or skills, and repeatedly coming back to each topic/skill multiple times within the same study session. Like, ABC ABC ABC instead of AAA BBB CCC. Previous research suggests that an interleaved schedule often results in better learning and long-term retention – though it tends to be more mentally demanding. If you’d like a more detailed refresher on the difference between blocked and interleaved practice, here’s a 6-min video summary).

Blocked vs interleaved practice

During the blocked study phase, participants were presented with 15 pictures of the same type of bird, one after another. Like, finch example #1, finch example #2, all the way up to finch example #15, and then jay example #1, jay example #2, and so on.

During the interleaved study session, the bird pictures were all shuffled and presented in random order. So instead of seeing 15 different sparrows, 15 different tyrant flycatchers, and then 15 different wood warblers, they might see 2 sparrows, and then 1 tyrant flycatcher, 3 wood warblers, 1 sparrow, etc.

Rating effort and learning effectiveness

After each study session, participants were asked to rate how mentally effortful they found that particular study session to be, and, how much they thought they learned, from 1-6 (1=not at all; 6=a lot).

Questions included, “How mentally exhausting was the last exercise?” (i.e. perception of effort). And “How well did you learn to distinguish the types of birds?” (i.e. perception of learning effectiveness).

After participants completed both study sessions, they were asked to compare the two in terms of mental effort and learning. With questions like “Which strategy was harder for you?” (effort) and “Which do you think is a more effective learning strategy for you?” (learning).

And then they were asked to choose which study strategy they would use if they had to study and take a test on even more birds.

What did the researchers learn from all of this?

What do learners prefer?

Well, for one, there was a clear preference for the blocked study schedule, with 68% of participants reporting that they would choose the blocked strategy to study for a test, while only 32% chose the interleaved strategy.

Um, ok, so what’s the big deal?

Well, this preference is actually pretty interesting, because the research on blocked vs. interleaved practice suggests that in many cases, blocked practice results in relatively poor learning and interleaving is actually the more effective strategy (here’s a great summary of the research on interleaved practice, why and how it works, guidelines for use, and examples of times when blocked might be better).

So why the heck would participants choose a study strategy that is less effective?

Why?

Well, there are two things that seemed to factor into their choice.

For one, participants rated interleaved practice as being significantly more demanding than blocked practice (4.38, where 1=blocked more demanding, 6=interleaved more demanding, and 3.5=both equally demanding).

More tellingly, participants perceived interleaved practice as being less effective for learning than the blocked strategy (2.85, where 1=blocked more effective, 6=interleaved more effective, and 3.5=both equally effective).

And these two factors were also related, in that the more mentally demanding and effortful participants found the interleaved strategy to be, the lower they rated its effectiveness as a study strategy.

In other words, the more effort they had to put into the study strategy, the less they felt they were learning.

The misinterpreted-effort hypothesis

Is there any chance participants were just lazy and didn’t want to put in more effort? Could this be the real reason why they preferred the blocked study schedule?

Well, it’s possible that this could have been a tiny factor for some – but the data actually shows more support for what the authors call the “misinterpreted-effort hypothesis.”

They suggest that learners don’t gravitate to less effective study or practice strategies because they just feel easier. It’s more that learners legitimately can’t tell which strategy leads to better learning in that moment.

It’s kind of like how in the middle of a workout, it’s difficult to know whether the workout routine you’ve chosen is leading to more strength gains than another workout routine you could be doing instead.

So when we struggle – like when we have difficulty making sense of a math review problem, or when we can’t seem to get a note to speak in quite the right way in a run-through – it appears that we misinterpret greater effort as a sign of poorer learning.

And this is why we tend to gravitate to activities like re-reading our textbook, which feels easier and more productive than struggling for five minutes to solve a review problem and still getting it wrong.

Or why it can be tempting to play the same passage 20 or 30 (or 50!) times straight in hopes of committing it to “muscle memory,” rather than struggling through a recorded run-through, to see if we can get that tricky passage exactly right, in context, the very first time. Even though, the more effortful strategy is the one that often leads to more effective learning.

Takeaways

One of my childhood teachers, Michael Davis*, said something to me once in a lesson that at the time, I didn’t quite understand.

Something to the effect of, “If practicing feels easy, you’re probably not doing it right.”

At the time, this didn’t seem like very useful advice. But in hindsight, I can totally appreciate what he was trying to tell me. That practice is supposed to be a bit of a struggle. That you’re not supposed to sound great 100% of the time. And that if you do sound great, maybe it’s less an indication that you’re awesome, and more a sign that you’re probably sacrificing growth. Because if we never experiment with something new, or never work on things that are hard for us, it’s going to be pretty difficult to improve the range of our skills and abilities.

So perhaps it’s important to keep reminding students (and ourselves), that just because something feels difficult, it doesn’t mean that we’re not improving in little ways, or learning things that will help us get better eventually. And, that if we’re not struggling in the practice room – it might be that we’re spending too much time working on things that are actually too easy.

*Mr. Davis passed away some years ago, but now that I have students of my own, reflecting on this moment and hearing his voice in my head was a helpful reminder that some of the things we say probably do stick and rattle around in the heads of our students more than we may think. And even if our mind-blowingly profound nuggets of wisdom don’t seem to land in the moment, they may very well resurface years or decades later, resonating much more deeply, when the time is right. =)

References

Kirk-Johnson, A., Galla, B. M., & Fraundorf, S. H. (2019). Perceiving effort as poor learning: The misinterpreted-effort hypothesis of how experienced effort and perceived learning relate to study strategy choice. Cognitive Psychology, 115, 101237.