New Conceptualizations of Practice: Common Principles in Three Paradigms Suggest New Concepts for Training

Abstract

We argue herein that typical training procedures are far from optimal. The goal of training in real-world settings is, or should be, to supporr two aspects of posttraining performance: f a ) the transfer rhat training ro related tasks and altered contexts. The implicit or explicit assumption of those persons responsible for training is that the procedures that enhance performance and speed improvement during training will necessarily achieve these two goals. Howelver, a variety of experiments on motor and verbal learning indicate that this assumption is ofien incorrect. Manipulations that maximize performance during training can be detrimental in rhe long term; conversely, manipulations chat degrade rhe speed of acquisition can support the long-term goals of training. Thefact that there are parallel level Of Performance in the long term and (b) the capability to findings in the motor and verbal domains suggests that princiPies of considerable generali0 can be deduced to upgrade training procedures.Over the past several years, through the normal Process of conducting our own individual research programs (in movement learning and human memory, respectively), and as a consequence of listening to and reading reports of each other's work, we have repeatedly encountered research findings that seem to violate Some basic assumptions about how to optimize learning in real-world settings. For example, increasing the frequency of information presented to learners about performance errors during practice improves performance during training, yet can degrade performance on a test of long-term retention or transfer. Increasing the amount of task variability required during practice, in contrast, depresses performance during training, yet facilitates performance on later tests of the ability to generalize training to altered conditions. Such findings challenge common views of skill learning. Compared with some baseline training condition, how can a factor that enhances performance in practice interfere with retention or transfer performance? Even more intriguing, how can another factor that deGeneral Article grades performance in practice enhance retention performance?These findings-and others we discuss below-are oberal different verbal and motor tasks, and the theoretical motivations guiding those research efforts are often different as well. Taken together, however, these findings tained from diverse research paradigms that employ sevsuggest that certain conce~tualizations about how and when to Practice are at best incomplete, and at worst incorrect. These findings also have some theoretical hplications with respect to the processes involved in practice, particularly as they relate to the acquisition of realworld skills.In this article, we first describe what we regard as Some of the viewpoints, assumptions, and paradigms that, implicitly or explicitly, have provided the foundation for the typical procedures that guide practice and skill acquisition. These views of learning, though flawed in our opinion, have had a strong in...

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“…Such varying levels of task difficulty, however, pose constantly changing environmental demands forcing the cognitive system continuously out of its routines and hence could be sufficient to trigger cognitive plasticity. In line with this assumption, Schmidt and Bjork (1992) gave an overview of motor and verbal concept training studies demonstrating that training with variability in task demands leads to greater transfer effects than training with constant task demands.In the present study, we therefore tested the hypothesis that adaptive WM training is superior to other training procedures because task difficulty is continuously adapted to individual performance instead of being varied von Bastian & Eschen: Does working memory training have to be adaptive? 4 performance-independently, thus differentiating between adaptivity and variability of task difficulty.…”

“…Moreover, in our recent study mentioned above , we found that training with complex span tasks was more effective than training with other tasks of WM capacity in terms of transfer to untrained WM and reasoning tasks. Second, the training regimen was intensive (20 sessions within four weeks, each lasting approximately 30 min) and followed recommendations for facilitating transfer effects such as providing variability and feedback (Schmidt & Bjork, 1992). To enhance variability, each group practiced three different tasks (each for approximately 10 min per session).…”

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