Teach Effectively!

I am way weary of the disrespect by educators for practice. I was reminded recently of my weariness when reading an article in the NY Times by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt with the title “A Star Is Made: The Birth-Month Soccer Anomaly.” (Alert readers may recognize Mr. Dubner and Mr. Levitt as the authors of the currently popular book, “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.”) In this article, Mr. Dubner and Mr. Levitt use an odd fact—high-achieving soccer players are more likely to have been born in the early months of a calendar year—to illustrate the benefits of practice.

To make their point, Mr. Dubner and Mr. Levitt depend on research by Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University, who found that people can learn to encode unusually long strings of digits (similar to the familiar digit span task used in some tests).

This success, coupled with later research showing that memory itself is not genetically determined, led Ericsson to conclude that the act of memorizing is more of a cognitive exercise than an intuitive one. In other words, whatever innate differences two people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those differences are swamped by how well each person “encodes” the information. And the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

Mr. Dubner and Mr. Levitt do not contend that practice is a complete explanation for superior competence; they also discuss the importance of doing things that one finds rewarding. This is, of course, a corrolary; if one finds something rewarding, she’s more like to do it over and over again!

It’s really nice to have this reminder of the importance of practice. Next time someone bemons having students practice something, using phrases such as “drill and kill” or talks about experts’ natural grasp of great competence, I may simply refer her or him to this article.

Link to the article by Mr. Dubner and Mr. Levitt and link the Freakonomics Web site. Also a link to an article by Professor Ericsson and Walter Kintsch on long-term memory (html) and another paper on expert performance (downloadable PDF) by Professor Ericsson, Ralf T. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer. (Google Scholar search for Professor Ericsson.)