Neuromyths Part 4: Drill to Kill & Multitasking

The more we practice, the better, right? Well, that depends on how you practice, how long in one go, and whether you're focused or not.

This is the fourth post in the Neuromyths series. Make sure you check out parts 1, 2, and 3 as well. You can find a link to them throughout the text.

1. Drill to Kill

Origin

Uses promptos facit

Dates back to the 1500s

Ever heard that saying? In its original form, from the Latin, it used to mean literally Use makes Mastery. Our most modern version of it is:

Practice makes perfect

It is hard to say how long this notion has been around in human civilization, but we could argue that, throughout History, some values such as dedication, mastery, and discipline have been part of different societies. Think about the Spartan soldiers at the pinnacle of their human form through intense practice from an early age. Or the Ancient Roman sculptors who dedicated their lives to perfecting the skill of carving marble. Picture the Japanese samurai who could behead a person and stop the blade a few centimeters before it touched the skin of their neck (gruesome example, I know).

It does seem like practice makes perfect, doesn’t it? The more you train, repeat or drill, the better you get at something. But can you achieve perfection? If so, how much should you practice, and for how long? It depends on what type of repetition you prioritize. Let’s look at why this idea of endless repetition can be considered a neuromyth and why we should probably change the quote to “Practice makes more permanent”

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Why is it a myth?

Perfection is such an ideal that I’d like to think we can never achieve it. Professional athletes have their good and bad days. They can break a record on Monday and come in last the next week. And someone will most certainly always break their record in the future. No matter how many times you repeat a skill or rehearse something you have learned, you’re still susceptible to forgetting and making mistakes.

But I’m concerned with one specific type of practice we have our students do in class. It’s called drilling. According to the TeachingEnglish website sponsored by the British Council:

At its simplest, drilling means listening to a model, provided by the teacher, or a tape or another student, and repeating what is heard. This is a repetition drill, a technique that is still used by many teachers when introducing new language items to their students. The teacher says (models) the word or phrase and the students repeat it

TeachingEnglish by the British Council

I have worked at schools where drilling was the foundation of their method (audiolingual). And I must confess it seemed to work well, particularly for lower levels. I’d say it worked well not because of how many times we drilled an item (a sentence, a grammar structure, an expression) in one lesson, but how many times we went back to it in the following lessons.

My point here is that drilling as much as you can may not be the best way to help your students if it is not based on two psychologically tested and recommended practices: Interleaved Practice, Deliberate Practice, and Spaced Repetition (Dunlosky et al. 2013)

Since the late 1800s, with Herman Ebbinghaus’ memory experiments, we have known that drilling to kill is usually OVERKILL. The best way to do it is by drilling just enough and going back to it (reviewing) some time after, then a little more time after and so on. This is called spaced repetition (Kornell & Bjork, 2008; Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2014). This works best when we add a day or a few days between practice sessions. The brain consolidates memory in our sleep.

Birnbaum et al. (2013) have also shown that drilling the same thing over and over might not be as effective as drilling one thing and then another and then going back to the first thing. It’s called interleaved practice.

Think about going to the gym to work out a group of muscles. How effective would it be for you to work out your biceps only, using the same type of exercise for as much as and as long as possible? The same principle applies. It’s better to vary the type of exercise and interleave it with exercises for a different group of muscles. And don’t forget you need to go back to the gym or work out that specific group again over time. The difference with how we learn in the classroom more effectively is how much space you add between sessions.

There’s a catch, though. If we’re learning a new skill or actually trying to master something - so we can achieve the top of our game, so to speak, another type of practice is recommended. That’s deliberate practice, which is connected with the notion of cumulative practice (Hughes & Lee, 2019). This strategy is like building a knowledge pyramid. You gradually add newly learned skills to previously mastered ones, practicing them together. It reinforces both old and new information while helping students differentiate between similar concepts.

Confused? Let me illustrate and check if we’re on the same page.

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SCENARIO 1: Student has three tests: guitar, math, and English. She needs to play a chord progression, and understand exponential equations, and the first conditional in English. Instead of cramming (or blocking) her practice at home, she decides to play 25 min of guitar, take a break, do 25 min of math exercises, take another break, and answer a worksheet about the first conditional. What type of practice is this?

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SCENARIO 2: Student has a guitar recital at the end of the month. She needs to learn a difficult song. She’s struggling with the chords and singing at the same time. She then decides to play the chords and their progressions slowly without singing. She gets each part right before moveing on to the next. After days studying, she finally tries to play and sing together. What type of practice is this?

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If you answered interleaved practice for scenario 1 and deliberate practice for scenario 2, you’re absolutely right. Interleaving works best when we’re revising and deliberate practice helps us master new learning.

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What does that all mean in the classroom?

Let’s imagine that we’re teaching a vocabulary lesson about fruits and vegetables (herbs included). Our students have already learned some items and now we’re moving on to a more complex list (such as zucchini/courgette, thyme, basil, eggplant/aubergine, squash, etc). A good idea would be having an activity to go back to the list they had already learned (lettuce, tomato, potato, etc) and then an activity using the novel items. Then repeat. If you want to space this out, you can set a timetable to review these words throughout the next 30 days. It could be once at the beginning of the next class as a quiz, then two lessons from that last revision as a game (e.g. Who am I? for fruits and veggies), then in the fifth lesson (from the input) and finally in the last lesson of this 30-day period.

At home, they can interleave this with another subject or a different topic/skill in English. Maybe a few minutes studying these new words + a break + a few minutes studying the Simple Past Tense. What students usually do is cram, that is, they do all their studying of topic X or Y in one long session. That doesn’t work very well.

2. Multitasking

Simply said, it’s the ability to do more than one thing at a time. It’s often referred to as an admirable trait to have in this crazy information-craving and overload era. But can we actually do it?

Origin

It dates back to the mid-60s with the publication of IBM’ new product S/360. It referred to its incredible processing capabilities that allowed this mainframe computer to do things no other computer had been able to do before.

Why is it a myth?

Our brain’s ability to focus and take in information is much more limited than we’d like to admit. Miller (1956) and Sweller (1988) had already discussed that we can suffer from cognitive overload when exposed to too many things at the same time. Several studies have shown that doing two things at once will worsen our performance because the brain needs to shift our attention back and forth to complete the two tasks (see the meta-analysis by Wolpert, 2009). It’s actually better to complete one task first and then do the other.

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What does that all mean in the classroom?

Well, I suppose the biggest potential problem in the classroom has to do with technology, mainly social media. I realize that this might be quite difficult to control depending on your educational setting, but if students are posting on social media while you’re teaching, or texting someone during an activity, their brains are struggling to keep focused and the research suggests that their performance will be negatively affected.

Ideally, we should limit multifunctional digital devices. That means that if your students can use a computer or a phone that allows them to access the internet (funny dances on TikTok, videogames, or cute cat videos on YouTube), there’s no guarantee they’ll be able to self-regulate and avoid these distractions. In fact, since their brains are still developing and they cannot control their impulsiveness very well, it’s not a very good idea to allow them to use such devices unrestrictedly (Horvath & Bott, 2020)

A lot of teachers ask me what to do then. Limiting and restricting should work. If you choose to ban their phones from the classroom, for instance, I understand that you probably think that might have both positive and negative impacts. They might be outraged and hate you for it (and even rebel). But some schools have had interesting results doing that. Students might actually be able to focus better without the temptation of scrolling endlessly looking for that shot of dopamine. Remember: attention is essential for learning.

The case against homework

If drilling endlessly, particularly during a long study session on the same day, and multitasking are bad for learning, what does that tell us about homework? Well, while strategic practice is crucial for learning, it's important to remember the recent surge in research highlighting the negative impacts of excessive homework. I mean, just think about it. Kids and teenagers go home after a long day of study and are required to sit their butts for hours while piling on endless worksheets with the content they saw on that same day. They’re most certainly using their phones to check social media and watch videos while they try to complete the task.

Remember that sleep is needed for memory consolidation? Remember that multitasking doesn’t work? What can we do then?

As educators, we need to be smart about assigning homework. Are we sacrificing precious playtime and physical activity for workloads that don't translate to better learning? Instead of long worksheets to be done a few hours after the class, why not allow kids and teens to distribute their practice throughout a longer period and implement interleaved and deliberate practice into their study routine according to their needs? (Horvath & Bott, 2020)

REFERENCES

DRILL TO KILL

Birnbaum, M. S., Kornell, N., Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2013). Why interleaving enhances inductive learning: The roles of discrimination and retrieval. Memory & cognition, 41(3), 392-402.

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14, 4-58.

Hughes, C. A., & Lee, J.-Y. (2019). Effective Approaches for Scheduling and Formatting Practice: Distributed, Cumulative, and Interleaved Practice. TEACHING Exceptional Children, 51(6), 411-423.

Kornell, N., & Bjork, R. A. (2008). Learning concepts and categories: Is spacing the “enemy of induction”? Psychological Science, 19, 585–592.

MULTITASKING

Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review. 63 (2): 81–97

Sweller, J. (1988), Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning. Cognitive Science, 12: 257–285

Wolpert, S. (2009). Is technology producing a decline in critical thinking and analysis. UCLA Newsroom, 27.

Horvath, JC & Bott, D, 2020, 10 things schools get wrong: and how we can get them right, John Catt Educational Ltd, Melton, Woodbridge.