What if it takes more than practice to actually pick up a skill?
In his book "Outliers", Malcolm Gladwell theorized that 10,000 hours of practice seemed to be the threshold for true excellence in a given field. What he might have missed in this theory was the fact that it might take more than just hitting a specific whole number. In Peter Brown's book "Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning," he discusses what he believes is a more effective method to actually gain proficiency in the "real world" application of learning.
He argues for spacing out practices to allow time to forget what you have learned. These gaps may seem as if they slow down progress, but they serve an important function:
Almost everywhere you look, you find examples of massed practice: colleges that offer concentration in a single subject with the promise of fast learning, continuing education seminars for professionals where training is condensed into a single weekend. Cramming for exams is a form of massed practice. It feels like a productive strategy, and it may get you through the next day’s midterm, but most of the material will be long forgotten by the time you sit down for the final. Spacing out your practice feels less productive for the very reason that some forgetting has set in and you’ve got to work harder to recall the concepts. It doesn’t feel like you’re on top of it. What you don’t sense in the moment is that this added effort is making the learning stronger.
He applied these concepts in surgical training:
The benefits of spacing out practice sessions are long established, but for a vivid example consider this study of thirty-eight surgical residents. They took a series of four short lessons in microsurgery: how to reattach tiny vessels. Each lesson included some instruction followed by some practice. Half the docs completed all four lessons in a single day, which is the normal in-service schedule. The others completed the same four lessons but with a week’s interval between them.
In a test given a month after their last session, those whose lessons had been spaced a week apart outperformed their colleagues in all areas—elapsed time to complete a surgery, number of hand movements, and success at reattaching the severed, pulsating aortas of live rats. The difference in performance between the two groups was impressive. The residents who had taken all four sessions in a single day not only scored lower on all measures, but 16 percent of them damaged the rats’ vessels beyond repair and were unable to complete their surgeries.
Why is spaced practice more effective than massed practice? It appears that embedding new learning in long-term memory requires a process of consolidation, in which memory traces (the brain’s representations of the new learning) are strengthened, given meaning, and connected to prior knowledge—a pro cess that unfolds over hours and may take several days. Rapid fire practice leans on short-term memory. Durable learning, however, requires time for mental rehearsal and the other processes of consolidation. Hence, spaced practice works better. The increased effort required to retrieve the learning after a little forgetting has the effect of retriggering consolidation, further strengthening memory.
Here is a link to the full article which also discusses other examples of this theory: Ditch the 10,000 hour rule! Why Malcolm Gladwell’s famous advice falls short - Salon.com
