WEDNESDAY, Aug. 22, 2001 (HealthDayNews) -- If you like to learn a new skill by repeating it until you've got it down, you might be deluding yourself into thinking you know more than you actually do, a new study says.
The blocked practice method, or repetition of one skill, may produce better short-term results, but you'll have less skill retention and an inflated sense of how well you're doing, says the study's lead author, Dominic A Simon, a post-doctoral fellow in the department of kinesiology at Canada's McMaster University.
"People's expectations of how well they are doing are tied closely to how well they are doing right now," says Simon.
"In blocked practice, you get good at it, you correct the mistakes you just made," he adds, but the sense of mastery is somewhat artificial.
Previous research has proved that it's better to mix and match the skills you want to learn in a random way, Simon notes. Random practice, he says, requires people to repeatedly "reload" the motor program for each individual task.
"It's the cognitive behavior one has to engage in. You're solving the problem each time you're doing it," and not just fixing the last error you made, as you would in blocked practice, says Simon.
But Simon and his team took that concept one a step further, to explore metacognition, or what people know, about what they know.
Using both blocked- and random-practice techniques, the researchers had 48 undergraduates at UCLA practice typing three different five-key sequences on a computer keyboard number pad.
One group practiced the key sequences in blocked practice, typing until they correctly completed each sequence 30 times. The second group's patterns were randomly assigned.
The participants were asked to assess how well they'd learned the skills, and then predict how well they would retain the knowledge. Retention was measured by a next-day performance and a paper-and-pencil test.
As expected, the blocked-practice group performed better than the random-practice group in the early session. But, to the researchers' surprise, the random group had a higher retention rate.
In addition, the random group more accurately predicted how well they would retain the information, while the blocked group, happy with their early successes, overestimated their ability to perform.
From a practical perspective, says Simon, "if you're going to use immediate performance as a yardstick," you may get an inflated sense of your ability and stop practicing too soon, or you may convince your instructors that you're ready when you're not.
William Huitt, a professor in the department of psychology and counseling at Valdosta State University in Georgia, disagrees with the theory.
"Overestimating your abilities is beneficial to performance," he says. Even when you fail, he maintains, you are more likely to utilize your level of expertise more fully than if you underestimate your abilities.
Performance, metacognition, and the assessment and evaluation stages are distinct bodies of knowledge, Huitt adds. "Simply because a person believes that they are capable of performing competently is not enough."
Huitt says follow-up studies on other age groups, from 6 year olds to adults, would be beneficial.
"We need to have valid and reliable data, which is gathered from multiple observations and performance in a variety of situations, before we can make a decision on competence," he says.
The study appears in the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.
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