Principles of Learning

There is an ongoing debate between practicing part skills and then combining them into whole skills, once each part is mastered, to work on sequence, flow and smoothness versus practicing whole skills. I have seen this manifest as a person preference. My two sons chose to learn breaststroke differently. The oldest wanted to practice the whole skill. The second chose to practice kicking first, then pulling, and then later combining the two.

I believe it is useful to distinguish between different types of (or reasons for) practice: 1) Practice, or exercise, to increase one's mental, physical, emotional, or spiritual capacity to make it possible to know, understand or perform some desirable thing 2) Practice to get it. Example: learning to do a backhip circle is difficult, and the first time you make it around the bar, you got it. It may not be pretty, but you got it and then you can start working to perfect it. Another example: learning a song on the piano. Once you're able to play the song through, there may be some mistakes and the timing and rhythm may not be great, but you've got it. 3) Practice to perfect it. Once you're able to manage the basic thing, you can start working on the details of it to perfect it. Example: learning to point the toes and keep the body straight on the back hip circle; adding the dynamics to the song. 4) Practice to make it permanent. Once you've got it, and once you'v...

I may want to reference the ideas of Walter Gong in my discussion on practice. (The three personal model of learning and teaching in which learners become teachers.)

Paul Merrill took a piano class at BYU in which the students were required to give recitals periodically. One day the instructor said to him, "the difference between you and me is that you practice until you can get it right, I get it right and then I practice." Related idea: practice with feedback makes it perfect, then perfect practice makes it permanent.

Also from Freeman (1813), "...the learning of the letters in their detached situation, is a dry, tedious, discouraging process. But learning them, in learning words, is, it is presumed, much more tolerable. Indeed, the difference resembles that which is experienced by two travellers engaged in a toilsome journey, one of whom is amused with a variety of objects that attract his notice, and thus beguile the tediousness of the way; while the other sees no beauty in the surrounding scenery, but is perpetually poring over his present toil, and the disheartening distance that separates him from the end of his journey. We always like to observe too, that we are making a progress; and this animates us, in encountering difficulties. On the other hand, if we seem to make no advances, we are in great danger of abandoning our pursuit." (pg. 17)

Way back in 1813, John Freeman described a method of teaching adult persons to read in which printed cards were used. The first card contained 7 lessons. The first six lessons, together, contained 100 words (like an, can, man, than, as, has, on, up-on, ...). The seventh lesson was made up of words selected from the previous 6. (Freeman, 1813, p. 12) Additional repetition was built in as follows (from pg. 14): The first line of the first lesson, should be repeatedly gone over, till it be perfectly known; and then be dismissed, and the second learned in the same manner. Afterwards, the remaining lines in this lesson, should be learned, one at a time. When this is accomplished, the whole of the first lesson is to be repeated, the words being spelled before they are pronounced. The second lesson should then be learned in the same manner as the first. When that is done, proceed to the third, and then to the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh; taking one at a time, in the order in which they ...

Practice includes: tasks, activities, exercise, experience, and experimentation. The principles that will make a given learning experience effective are captured in (or at least, they should be capture in) the practice activity. Practice can be defined by the learner, the instructor, a peer, an activity in a textbook, an instructional video, an exercise routine. Practice also happens informally in the everyday experiences of our lives. Practice, in my use of the term, also includes one-time learning experiences like burning yourself on a hot stove and saying, I'll never do that again. And then never doing it again.