Allowing Learners to Choose: Self-Controlled Practice Schedules for Learning Multiple Movement Patterns

Yoked Versus Self-Controlled Practice Schedules and Performance on Dual-Task Transfer Tests

“…In the case of the present experiment, though cognitive and informational strategies could be explored by choice of target presentation order, movement strategies could have been explored throughout acquisition. Wu and Magill [3] described a pre-determined schedule as inhibitory to choice, evaluation and exploration of strategies. This may be the case when participants are able to choose the order of individual trials, such as in Wu and Magill [3], however this may not hold true in the case of the present experiment where participants were only able to choose blocks of trials.…”

“…Some recent studies (see [1,2] for reviews) have examined the utility of providing a learner with control over a portion of their practice context, including the scheduling of practice (e.g. [3]). This provision of control over a portion of the practice context to the learner is referred to as self-controlled practice [1].…”

“…One category of explanation hypothesizes that self-controlled practice plays a role in the motivation of the learner (see [4] for review), while the other category hypothesizes that one possible reason why a robust benefit of self control is seen in comparison to those not provided control over practice (yoked groups) is that those in a self-controlled condition engage in more cognitive effort than those in a yoked condition. In particular, it is hypothesized that those provided choice over a portion of practice, such as the scheduling of tasks, have greater demands placed on cognitive processes involved in decision making, monitoring, evaluating, correcting and strategizing [3,5]. These categories of explanation are not contradictory, and may, in fact, complement each other.…”

“…For example, self-control of the order in which versions of a task are practiced, [3,6] the progression though increasingly difficult versions of a task, [7] variability of practice, [5] and when to cease practice [8][9][10] have all been found to contribute beneficially to learning.…”

“…The implicit learning literature suggests that the characteristics of cognitive effort, such as that which takes place in self-controlled learning contexts, hinder performance on dual-task tests, therefore we hypothesize that: 1) based upon previous comparisons of self-controlled and yoked scheduling of practice (e.g. [3]), no differences would be seen between groups during the acquisition session for any of the dependent variables, 2) that the self-controlled practice group would perform with less error, 2-dimensional centroid error (CE) and 2-dimensional variable error (VE) than the yoked practice group on retention and transfer tests and 3) based upon previous comparisons of greater and lesser amounts of cognitive effort in practice (e.g. [14]) that the yoked group would perform with less (CE) and (VE) than the self-controlled group on the dual-task tests.…”