The effects of practice schedule on learning a complex judgment task

Abstract

The effects of practice schedule on learning a complex judgment task were investigated. In Experiment 1, participants' judgment accuracy on a retention test was higher after a random practice schedule than after a blocked schedule or operational schedule. Experiment 2 demonstrated that judgment on a transfer test was also better after a random practice schedule than after a blocked schedule. Both experiments failed to show any effects of practice schedule on performance during learning. These findings show that benefits of random practice for retention and transfer apply to learning a complex judgment task, and may be achieved without performance degradation during practice.

Contextual Interference Effect on Perceptual–Cognitive Skills Training

“…Our data provide evidence for the Cl effect, as the random group demonstrated significantly more accurate judgments in the 7-d laboratory-based retention test compared to the blocked group and the pretest. These data support previous research investigating the Cl effect on motor and perceptual-cognitive skills (10,11,15,16,31). However, these findings contradict those of Memmert et al (27), who did not provide any support for the Cl effect in this domain.…”

“…These data contradict the majority o f previous re searchers who have investigated the Cl effect (25,28). How ever, some researchers reported a lack o f difference between blocked and random practice groups during acquisition but still found the hypothesized differences in the retention and transfer phases (16), somewhat contradicting the "typical" Cl effect (20). A possible explanation for this finding is that the three invariant tennis skills contained variable parameters, such as shot location.…”

“…To our knowledge, no researchers have examined how practice should be structured during simulation training so that skills transfer more effectively to real-world performance, despite the widespread use of this method (8). For example, Helsdingen et al (15,16) showed that the Cl effect extended to complex police judgment tasks that involved prioritizing the urgency o f different case descriptions. The random prac tice group was significantly more accurate at solving cases compared to the blocked group in a posttest.…”

Spacing and induction: Application to exemplars presented as auditory and visual text

“…Research has found that the spacing effect holds for many different types of stimuli which include nonsense syllables (e.g., Ebbinghaus, 1985Ebbinghaus, /1913, pictures (e.g., Hintzman & Rogers, 1973), words (e.g., Glenberg & Lehmann, 1980), sentences (e.g., Rothkopf & Coke, 1966) and faces (e.g., Cornell, 1980). Additionally, the benefits of spacing have been found in experiments that involved learning complex judgement tasks (e.g., Helsdingen, Van Gog, & Van Merriënboer, 2011).…”

How experts practice: A novel test of deliberate practice theory.

“…The underlying structure of practice has been shown to affect the amount of performance improvement or learning that occurs during practice. Random practice scheduling has generally been shown to be better for learning than has blocked practice scheduling in a number of tasks, including a barrier knock-down task (Shea & Morgan, 1979), complex police judgments (Helsdingen, van Gog, & van Merrienboer, 2011), badminton serves (Goode & Magill, 1986), handwriting (Ste-Marie, Clark, Findlay, & Latimer, 2004), and problem solving in mathematics (Rohrer & Taylor, 2007). In a similar vein, self-selected practice schedules in which participants control the order of the practice are more effective for learning than are schedules selected by others (e.g., a coach or experimenter), including random practice (Day, Arthur, & Gettman, 2001;Hodges, Edwards, Luttin, & Bowcock, 2011;Holladay & Quiñones, 2003;Keetch & Lee, 2007;Wulf, Raupach, & Pfeiffer, 2005).…”