Does Good Practice Make Perfect?

Robinson, Matthew. "National Issue: Does Good Practice Make Perfect? Six In 10 Educators Say No; Researchers Say Yes." Investors Business Daily, Inc., April 24, 1998.

Nothing attracts more ire from modern educators than asking children to memorize and practice, whether it be their spelling words or multiplication tables. When polled last year, some six of 10 education professors objected to having kids memorize material. These educators, who teach K-12 teachers, warn that practice, homework and direct, systematic instruction turn kids into automatons, stifling their creativity and ultimately dooming their ability to learn. They even have a term for it: “Drill and kill.”

The result? American kids spend less time working under instruction, and do less homework than their global peers. But new findings in cognitive science and psychology support drills and practice. “Nothing flies more in the face of the last 20 years of research than the assertion that practice is bad,” asserted Professors John Anderson, Lynne Reder and Herbert Simon of Carnegie-Mellon University. “All evidence . . . indicates that real competence only comes with extensive practice. By denying the critical role of practice, one is denying children the very thing they need to achieve competence,” they wrote in a recent study. “The instructional problem is not to kill motivation by demanding drill, but to find tasks that provide practice - while at the same time sustaining interest.”

That idea is causing a stir in the education world. Anderson, Reder and Simon are applying their findings in cognitive psychology to challenge the education status quo. Kids, they argue, can learn better through “deliberate practice” - through hard work and constant feedback to master knowledge and tasks. Of course, this is what most Americans think of when they are asked about education. They think of learning core knowledge that will be useful later in life.
“Nobody expects someone to be great without a great deal of practice and time in sports or music,” Anderson said. “But it still seems that in the area of education, there is the notion that all we have to do is give a child a critical insight or inspiration and everything else will fall into place. “Intellectual competence has to build up with the same kind of deliberate practice as musical talent or athletic ability,” he added.

The education establishment’s views on practice and memorization go back to the beginning of the century. They were popularized by progressive educators such as John Dewey, William Heard Kilpatrick and Carl Rogers. Ideas in education drawn from these thinkers go by many names: rationalist or romantic theories of learning, constructivism, situated learning, project-style learning and discovery learning. The theories have in common the belief that kids need only look inside themselves for knowledge. In this view, education is all about letting kids discover what they need to learn. In fact, some theorists claim that kids are actually hurt by direct, systematic instruction.

And such ideas get broad support in schools of education. Fully 92% of education professors say that “teachers should see themselves as facilitators of learning, who enable their students to learn on their own.” Only 7% think teachers should be “conveyors of knowledge who enlighten their students with what they know.” They also believe that direct instruction leads to “routinization.” This, they think, drives out understanding.

“These valid objections to purely verbal, fragmented and passive education have . . . been used as a blunt instrument to attack all emphasis on factual knowledge and vocabulary,” wrote E.D. Hirsch in The Schools We Need. California learned the hard way that romantic theories of education don’t work as well as direct instruction. The State Board of Education reversed its position in 1995 on whole language reading theory. Whole language says that kids learn to read the same way they learn to speak - by absorbing new words in the reading situation. Instead of teaching kids to sound out words and break down harder words, they would learn to guess words’ meaning from context.

In other words, kids were largely left on their own to “discover” how to read and spell. After almost a decade of practicing this method, the state scored at the bottom of national reading tests. The nation’s biggest state now backs using direct instruction - including phonics instead of whole language to teach reading. “Children vary in the amount of practice that is required for automaticity and fluency in reading to occur,” the state’s Comprehensive Reading Leadership Program found. “Some need to read a word only once to recognize it again with greater speed; others need more than 20 exposures. . . . Therefore, it is vital that students read a large amount of text at their independent reading level, and that the text provide specific practice in the skills being learned.”

Translation: Learning requires reinforcement — practice and memorization — to master a subject. “It’s the missing link in American education,” said Arthur Bornstein, a memory training expert in Los Angeles. “Schools tell kids what to learn, but not how to do it.” Bornstein coaches schools on how to help students remember what they’re taught. Bornstein has watched schools slowly move away from stressing drills. “It’s a tragedy,” he said, “but too many schools now assume kids will just pick up things as they go along.”

Some experts argue that the education establishment’s downplaying of deliberate practice helps explain American students’ lower test scores. In the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, American students were near the bottom. U.S. high school seniors scored 19th out of 21 nations in math. In science, they scored 16th. American kids get nearly an hour less homework a day than the foreign average - 1.7 hours compared with 2.6 hours.

A study by James W. Stigler, professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that the average Japanese student gets instruction 90% of the time spent in the classroom. American kids get it only 46% of the time. But cognitive research shows practice isn't just important for students. Teachers need it, too. Asian teachers spend much more time preparing to teach lessons. And although American teachers have smaller classes, they get less prep time.

But do drills stifle creativity, as many educators charge? No, says Temple University psychology professor Robert W. Weisberg. Weisberg has studied the link between creativity and knowledge in artists such as Mozart, Picasso and Jackson Pollack. What he’s found is surprising. “It’s a paradox,” Weisberg said. “There is evidence that deep immersion is required in a discipline before you produce anything of great novelty. Before you look at significant achievement, expect to see 10 years of deep immersion to gain knowledge.” But, he noted, “There is this concept that genius has leaps of insight way beyond everybody else. If you look at the backgrounds of these people, there is much more of a progression. They don’t make leaps — they build in small pieces.” Studies show that the brain actually changes with deliberate practice. A report in the journal Science shows that the cortical areas of the brain devoted to controlling the fingers actually expand for expert violinists.

Of course, repetitive drilling has its skeptics. “If deliberate practice just meant rote memorization, then I wouldn’t like it,” said Boston College psychology professor Ellen Winner. “If (it) means working at something until you got it just right, like in a play, then I am all for it.”