The offensive coaches can make all the plans they want to about the hypothetical game, but once play gets under way, the execution rests in the hands of the quarterback.
For Coach Dooley’s team, it’s all there: retrieval, spacing, interleaving, variation, refl ection, and elaboration. The seasoned quarterback going into Saturday’s game— mentally run-
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ning through the plays, the reactions, the adjustments— is doing the same thing as the seasoned neurosurgeon who’s rehearsing what’s about to unfold in the operating room.
The Takeaway
Here’s a quick rundown of what we know today about massed practice and its alternatives. Scientists will continue to deepen our understanding.
We harbor deep convictions that we learn better through single- minded focus and dogged repetition, and these beliefs are validated time and again by the visible improvement that comes during “practice- practice- practice.” But scientists call this heightened per for mance during the acquisition phase of a skill “momentary strength” and distinguish it from “underlying habit strength.” The very techniques that build habit strength, like spacing, interleaving, and variation, slow visible acquisition and fail to deliver the improvement during practice that helps to motivate and reinforce our efforts.12
Cramming, a form of massed practice, has been likened to binge- and- purge eating. A lot goes in, but most of it comes right back out in short order. The simple act of spacing out study and practice in installments and allowing time to elapse between them makes both the learning and the memory stronger, in effect building habit strength.
How big an interval, you ask? The simple answer: enough so that practice doesn’t become a mindless repetition. At a minimum, enough time so that a little forgetting has set in. A little forgetting between practice sessions can be a good thing, if it leads to more effort in practice, but you do not want so much forgetting that retrieval essentially involves relearning the material. The time periods between sessions of practice let memories consolidate. Sleep seems to play a large role in
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memory consolidation, so practice with at least a day in between sessions is good.
Something as simple as a deck of fl ashcards can provide an example of spacing. Between repetitions of any individual card, you work through many others. The German scientist Sebastian Leitner developed his own system for spaced practice of fl ashcards, known as the Leitner box. Think of it as a series of four fi le- card boxes. In the fi rst are the study materials (be they musical scores, hockey moves, or Spanish vocabulary fl ashcards) that must be practiced frequently because you often make mistakes in them. In the second box are the cards you’re pretty good at, and that box gets practiced less often than the fi rst, perhaps by a half. The cards in the third box are practiced less often than those in the second, and so on. If you miss a question, make mistakes in the music, fl ub the one-touch pass, you move it up a box so you will practice it more often. The underlying idea is simply that the better your mastery, the less frequent the practice, but if it’s important to retain, it will never disappear completely from your set of practice boxes.
Beware of the familiarity trap: the feeling that you know something and no longer need to practice it. This familiarity can hurt you during self- quizzing if you take shortcuts. Doug Larsen says, “You have to be disciplined to say, ‘All right, I’m going to make myself recall all of this and if I don’t, what did I miss, how did I not know that?’ Whereas if you have an instructor- generated test or quiz, suddenly you have to do it, there’s an expectation, you can’t cheat, you can’t take mental shortcuts around it, you simply have to do that.”
The nine quizzes Andy Sobel administers over the twenty-six meetings of his po liti cal economics course are a simple example of spaced retrieval practice, and of interleaving—
because he rolls forward into each successive quiz questions pertaining to work from the beginning of the semester.
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Interleaving two or more subjects during practice also provides a form of spacing. Interleaving can also help you develop your ability to discriminate later between different kinds of problems and select the right tool from your growing toolkit of solutions.
In interleaving, you don’t move from a complete practice set of one topic to go to another. You switch before each practice is complete. A friend of ours describes his own experience with this: “I go to a hockey class and we’re learning skating skills, puck handling, shooting, and I notice that I get frustrated because we do a little bit of skating and just when I think I’m getting it, we go to stick handling, and I go home frustrated, saying, ‘Why doesn’t this guy keep letting us do these things until we get it?’ ” This is actually the rare coach who understands that it’s more effective to distribute practice across these different skills than polish each one in turn. The athlete gets frustrated because the learning’s not proceeding quickly, but the next week he will be better at all aspects, the skating, the stick handling, and so on, than if he’d dedicated each session to polishing one skill.
Like interleaving, varied practice helps learners build a broad schema, an ability to assess changing conditions and adjust responses to fi t. Arguably, interleaving and variation help learners reach beyond memorization to higher levels of conceptual learning and application, building more rounded, deep, and durable learning, what in motor skills shows up as underlying habit strength.
Something the researchers call “blocked practice” is easily mistaken for varied practice. It’s like the old LP rec ords that could only play their songs in the same sequence. In blocked practice, which is commonly (but not only) found in sports, a drill is run over and over. The player moves from one station to the next, performing a different maneuver at each station.
That’s how the LA Kings were practicing their one- touch pass
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before they got religion and started changing it up. It would be like always practicing fl ashcards in the same order. You need to shuffl e your fl ashcards. If you always practice the same skill in the same way, from the same place on the ice or fi eld, in the same set of math problems, or during the same sequence in a fl ight simulator, you’re starving your learning on short rations of variety.
Spacing, interleaving, and variability are natural features of how we conduct our lives. Every patient visit or football game is a test and an exercise in retrieval practice. Every routine traffi c stop is a test for a cop. And every traffi c stop is different, adding to a cop’s explicit and implicit memory and, if she pays attention, making her more effective in the future. The common term is “learning from experience.” Some people never seem to learn. One difference, perhaps, between those who do and don’t is whether they have cultivated the habit of re-fl ection. Refl ection is a form of retrieval practice (What happened? What did I do? How did it work out?), enhanced with elaboration (What would I do differently next time?).
As Doug Larsen reminds us, the connections between the neurons in the brain are very plastic. “Making the brain work is actually what seems to make a difference— bringing in more complex networks, then using those circuits repeatedly, which makes them more robust.”
4
Embrace Diffi
culties
When Mia Blundetto, age twenty- three, fi rst lieutenant, U.S. Marine Corps, was billeted to logistics in Okinawa, she had to get her ticket punched at jump school.
Describing that moment two years later, she said, “I hate falling, that feeling in your chest. There’s not a day in my life I wanted to jump out of an airplane. I wouldn’t even go down a water slide until I was in middle school. But I was in charge of a platoon of Marines who rigged parachutes and jumped out of airplanes and dropped cargo. It’s one of the most sought-out billets as a logistics offi cer, very hard to get. My command-ing offi cer said, you know, ‘You will be air delivery platoon commander. If you don’t want to do that, I’ll put you somewhere else and we’ll let the next guy have that job.’ There’s no way I could let somebody else have this job that everybody wanted. So I looked him straight in the face and said, ‘Yes, sir, I’ll jump out of planes.’ ”1
67
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Mia is fi ve feet seven inches of blonde ambition. Her father, Frank, ex- marine, is in awe. “She’ll do more pull- ups than most of the guys in her class. She has the Mary land state record in the bench press, she was sixth in the NCAA for powerlifting.
Very soft- spoken; you just don’t see it coming.” When we had Mia to ourselves, we asked her if Frank was blowing smoke.
She laughed. “He likes to exaggerate.” But when pressed, she admitted to the facts. Until recently, women in the Marines were required to do fl ex arm hangs instead of pull- ups (where the chin crosses the plane of the pull- up bar), but the newly toughened rules effective in 2014 require a minimum of three pull- ups, the same as the minimum for men. Targets are eight pull- ups for women, twenty for men. Mia does thirteen and is shooting for twenty. As a student at the Naval Academy, she qualifi ed two years in a row for nationals in powerlifting—
three sets each of bench press, squats, and dead lifts— setting Mary land state rec ords.
So we know she’s tough. An aversion to falling is an instinctual refl ex for self- preservation, but her decision to take the assignment was a foregone conclusion, the kind of grit the Marines and the Blundettos are known for. Mia has a sister and two brothers. They’re all active duty Marines.
As it turned out, the third time Mia threw herself out the jump door of a C130 troop transport at 1,250 feet, she plummeted right onto another soldier’s infl ated parachute. But we’re getting ahead of the story.
We’re interested in her jump school training because it’s a great example of how some diffi culties that elicit more effort and that slow down learning— spacing, interleaving, mixing up practice, and others— will more than compensate for their incon ve nience by making the learning stronger, more precise, and more enduring. Short- term impediments that make for stronger learning have come to be called desirable diffi culties,
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a term coined by the psychologists Elizabeth and Robert Bjork.2
The army’s jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia, is designed to make sure you get it right and get it done, and it’s a model of learning through desirable diffi culty. You are not allowed to carry a notebook and write notes. You listen, watch, rehearse, and execute. Jump school is a place where testing is the principal instructional medium, and the test is in the doing.
And, like all things military, jump school adheres to a strict protocol. Get it right or get the boot.
The parachute landing fall, or PLF in military parlance, is a technique of hitting the ground and rolling in a way that distributes the impact over the balls of your feet, the side of your calf, the side of your thigh, the side of your hip, and the side of your back. There are six possible directions in which to execute the fall along the length of your body, determined by conditions in the moment such as the direction of your drift, the terrain, wind, and whether you’re oscillating as you approach the ground. In your fi rst exposure to this essential skill of parachuting, you stand in a gravel pit where the PLF is explained and demonstrated. Then you try it: you practice falling along different planes of the body, you get corrective feedback, and you practice it again.
Over the ensuing week the diffi culty is notched up. You stand on a platform two feet off the ground. On the command
“Ready,” you rock up on the balls of your feet, feet and knees together, arms skyward. On the command “land,” you jump off the wall and execute your PLF.
The test becomes more diffi cult. You clip yourself onto a zip line a dozen feet off the ground, grab onto an overhead T-bar, and drift down to a landing site, where, on command,
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you release and execute the PLF. You practice falling to the right and left, forward and backward, mixing it up.
The diffi culty is increased again. You climb to a platform twelve feet off the ground, where you practice strapping on your harness, checking gear using the buddy system, and jumping through a mockup of an airplane jump door. The harness has risers like those from a parachute, hooked to a zip line but allowing for the same long arc of suspension, and when you jump, you have the momentary downward sensation of free fall, followed by the broad oscillations of suspension as you move along the cable, getting familiar with the motions of a real jump. But at the bottom it’s the instructor, not you, who pulls the release and drops you the last two or three feet to earth, so now you’re executing your fall randomly, from all directions, simulating what’s to come.
