Deliberate Practice

It is clear, after months of study in a training effectiveness project I have been pursuing, that lecture is undeserving in its continued prevalence in higher ed and secondary education.

We have a solid evidence, based on emergent systems 1 and 2 thinking, that lecture has to go.

....In this study, Wieman trained a postdoc, Louis Deslauriers, and a graduate student, Ellen Schelew, in an educational approach, called “deliberate practice,” that asks students to think like scientists and puzzle out problems during class. For 1 week, Deslauriers and Schelew took over one section of an introductory physics course for engineering majors, which met three times for 1 hour. A tenured physics professor continued to teach another large section using the standard lecture format.

The results were dramatic: After the intervention, the students in the deliberate practice section did more than twice as well on a 12-question multiple-choice test of the material as did those in the control section. They were also more engaged—attendance rose by 20% in the experimental section, according to one measure of interest—and a post-study survey found that nearly all said they would have liked the entire 15-week course to have been taught in the more interactive manner.

DP is not lecture. What it is also not is playing games or teacher entertaining the class.

At the heart of it is what Kahneman tells us about all System 2 thinking: it is effortful. It is also social and features very short feedback loops.

Links:

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/05/a-better-way-to-teach.html

http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1993-40718-001


From Freakonomics Blog:

Thanks to recent, hugely popular books about the development of expertise, the term deliberate practice is coming into common usage as the kind of practice that produces expertise.

Deliberate practice requires careful reflection on what worked and what didn’t work. (and this is key, I think: immediate feedback) A budding concert pianist may practice a particularly troublesome passage listening for places where his fingers do not flow smoothly. A chess student may spend hours analyzing one move of a world-championship chess match trying to see what the grandmasters saw. This kind of practice demands time for reflection and intense concentration, so intense that it is difficult to sustain for longer than 3 hours per day.

As I have learned more about deliberate practice, I often think about its lessons for the educational system. And they are not happy ones.

In the grade-school years, deliberate practice is already hard to find. My strongest memory from fifth-grade mathematics is pages and pages of tedious three-digit-by-three-digit multiplication problems. Day after day! It is, alas, the kind of rote practice that I have done for chess: simply playing lots of games.

In a classic paper, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in Chess Expertise,” Neil Charnessand colleagues studied the effect on chess rating of different types of chess practice, including total hours of serious study (i.e., deliberate practice) and total hours of tournament play (their Table 3). The effect of deliberate practice far outweighed the effect of tournament play. Related: Gutenberg method

http://entropysite.oxy.edu/morrison.html




What does the Gutenberg Method involve? Simply this. You assign the students portions of the textbook to study before they come to class. When they come into the classroom, they are already acquainted with the material. You don't waste your time, and theirs, outlining the course. You don't waste time telling them that butyric acid smells like rancid butter, and that valeric acid smells like old socks, and other difficult intellectual concepts. The textbook has taken all that drudgery off your hands. You don't waste your time doing what Frank Lambert calls "presenting a boardful of elegantly organized material with beautiful answers to questions that the students have not asked."


The students have read the material, they have thought about it, and they have questions to ask about it. You answer these questions, or, better still, try to get them to answer their own questions, or get other students to give the answers. You ask questions. You have a discussion. If they're slow to come alive, you take up points that you know give students trouble. You lead them through difficult problems. The entire class hour becomes like those few golden moments at the end of an old-fashioned lecture when a few students manage to rise above the system and gather around your desk.