Reading focus
Syllabus: How Does Practice Build Skill?
Use the learning–performance distinction to define success before choosing a practice method. Track the kinds of retention and transfer evidence the review brings together, while keeping examples from different domains separate.
A question to consider. For a skill you want to learn, what delayed test and what new task would reveal something that your best practice-session performance cannot?
Why this reading
Instruction can make performance look better without producing equally durable learning. This review brings evidence from motor skills, verbal learning, and judgments of learning together around that problem.
Before you read
Acquisition is the training phase; retention tests what remains later; transfer tests performance under changed demands. Metacognition concerns judgments about one’s own thinking and learning. The authors distinguish relatively lasting learning from performance at a particular moment.
Read for
- Compare examples of learning without immediate improvement with examples of improvement that fails to endure.
- Track how practice spacing, practice variability, and feedback affect training performance and later tests differently.
- Examine why an experience that feels fluent can produce a misleading judgment of mastery, and how later evidence could correct that judgment.
Consider afterwards
- Two practice methods produce different end-of-session scores. Design a later comparison that could reveal which method better supports retention and transfer. What would a fair comparison need to hold constant?
Editorial context
This is an integrative narrative review, not a meta-analysis estimating one effect for every learning task. Its examples support evaluating learning beyond immediate performance. They do not imply that difficulty is always helpful, that feedback should be eliminated, or that any one practice schedule suits every learner and skill.