| I like to use the phrase "practice makes permanent" - not "practice make perfect", cause every instructor disagrees, and not "perfect practice makes perfect" because perfection is subjective and a fool's errand. In a nutshell, whatever you do in practice will be what you do in application. This leads to then what I consider "foundational knowledge", or refining your understanding on Bloom's Remember, Understand, and Apply categories. I think we try too hard to push students toward the Analyze, Evaluate, and Create categories too quickly, which results in poorer performance, especially in the classroom context where the next course assumes "mastery" (another term I dislike, I prefer proficient). Once a student is proficient, then we can talk theory all day. So, in my classrooms, I mirror the methodology I commonly see in martial arts - warm-up, demonstrate technique, drill the technique, and (depending on the art) spar, or apply the technique. If you are struggling at one of these steps, then we can identify the issues and provide intervention practice at the appropriate level. Traditional classrooms don't really allow for extended spaced repetition, but I do believe it helps form autonomy. More specific to your question since most of the above is just my general opinions on learning: - Notes are good and writing notes is better than copy-pasting them [1] - Highlighting your notes for important details is a lower level practice that is also beneficial [2] - If you are given a technique/algorithm, attempt to do it on additional practice problems. If you can, through spaced repetition. For example, if you were learning the A* Search algorithm, change the starting and goal nodes in your current examples or make a new one with randomized numbers. - Chi's ICAP Framework has a few additional points as well on which lower level practices are better than others [3]. However, as I'm arguing in my dissertation, better overall may not be better for the individual. If a student is struggling in a Constructive activity, I'm arguing it may be better to 'downgrade' them to a lower-level activity to reinforce understanding (again, my thoughts toward foundational knowledge). [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1240624.1240773 [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/036147... [3] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1044018.pdf |
This is a great view. To add to this from a learner's perspective, though I'm not a professional educator (thanks for sharing your perspective as one): I've found that the ideas about worrying about "perfect practice" to be intimidating, especially as I've struggled with a 'perfectionist' tendency that causes procrastination and hesitation to attempt any practice at all.
People are wary of learning something wrong, then having to re-learn it, but I think that's a far better problem than delaying or avoiding learning something at all (with quality instruction, it's unlikely one can practice too far from the ideal; and even if that happens, it's not the end of the world. When attempting to learn, I try to remember the following quote from a webpage shared on HN a while back [0]: "Stay calm. Remember, you can’t become worse off than when you started."
[0] https://devjac.dev/posts/2021-05-29-my-personal-creed-of-emp...