get everyone as you can see today's lecture is looking at distribution and amount of practice now it's generally accepted that the more practice someone gets or the more practice that they do the better their achievements are going to be now interestingly the research that's being conducted in this area doesn't actually grow with this and it's not always the case now this is probably a good thing I guess if you're looking from the perspective of teachers coaches therapists often these people work within really strict time limitations they don't have the opportunity to spend an endless amount of time trying to work on certain areas so with this in mind teachers coaches and therapists they need to know how to structure their lessons and their learning so that they can help their learners their athletes or their patients achieve the most that they possibly can in these learning scenarios so I guess if moving on from there this lecture is going to examine what practice schedules will result in the most effective learning now when we're trying to arrange or structure the most appropriate practice schedules there are two important questions that need to be answered the first being is it better to have fewer but longer practice sessions or is it better to have shorter practice sessions but more of them the second question is how much rests two people need between practice trials to ensure that the optimal learning is going to occur to help us answer the first question the first thing we're going to do is we're going to actually define massed and distributed practice when referring to practice sessions a master practice schedule involves fewer practice sessions but those sessions tend to last for a longer amount of time so in this example the one we've seen here is someone that he's obviously coaching or trying to learn how to serve in tennis in total there's three hours so there's three one-hour sessions an hour each day and there's no breaks at the other end of continuum a distributed practice schedule even though it has the same amount of practice occurring the sessions there's more of them but the sessions are actually running over a short amount of time so you can see here there's again three hours of practice happening over three days but those hours are broken into a shorter session so there's four by 15-minute sessions and there's breaks in-between so again they've each had three hours but you've got masked happening less sessions ago for longer and he got distributed with more sessions that go for shorter and this breaks in between on the other hand when you're referring to practice trials massed practice involves a schedule where the rest between the trials is very short so that the practice is essentially continuous distributed schedules is when there's much longer rest intervals than the actual massed comparison okay so it's basically been stated that the length of the rest interval for am a schedule is shorter than the amount of time to complete the skill so for example if you're talking about a tennis serve it probably only take you between 1 & 2 seconds to execute the serve so therefore for a mass schedule you'd only have 2 seconds tops or it haven't basically no rest so it would be pretty much grabbing the next tennis ball out of your pocket and executing their next trial the serve on the other hand for a distributed schedule the rest is going to be as long or longer in the skill performance so you would have a minimum say 2 seconds rest between your serve up until probably could be 30 seconds rest so you give them more time to think about what's happened if you're looking at a skill or a trial such as a 200-meter sprint it might take that learner 30 seconds to complete the 200 meters so that learner or the athlete would only have the same amount of time to rest if it's a module if you're talking about a distributed schedule that would have a minimum amount of time so if it's say 30 seconds or more so they might have up to 2 or 3 minutes rest between that trial and the next trial ok now on this slide this diagram is going to show you some good examples about how we can compare the mast and the distributed practices you can see with regard to this section here on these sessions the massed practice schedule has less sessions but they offer longer so you can see there they've got two four-hour sessions per week but the actual training only lasts for two weeks you work your way up to the other end of the continuum you've then got more sessions so you can see there's two one-hour sessions per week but the actual training lasts for up to eight weeks so there's more sessions but there have been quicker if you work your way down to a kicking skill which is very much a discrete skill you can see that the master practice schedule is one second rest so it's essentially attempting the skill so kicking the ball grabbing the next ball kicking it again grabbing the next ball kicking again and so on if you go up to the other end of the distributed schedule you would have say 30 seconds of rest between each trial so they've got more time to think about and maybe try to process what's happened the last part of the diagram you can see it's looking at the running skills so again if you have the massed practice it might be again the example we spoke office of 200 meters the 30-second rest would be after the 200 meters you've just completed so you're pretty much having the same amount of rest as it took you to complete it at the distributed schedule you've got five minutes rest between each trial so again you've got much greater length of rest occurring an important topic that comes up when we're deciding on a practice schedule is the length and distribution of the practice sessions remembering that there are often limits on how long we can actually spend trying to help our learners or athletes to learn something new for example in a teaching setting if you're a PE teacher you may only have 10 days for a unit of instruction or if you're a dance teacher or if you're a part of a band you may only have a month until that big performance is due and this type of scenario is why we're often asking ourselves a question is it better to have fewer but longer practice sessions or more but shorter practice sessions now the available evidence that's come from research suggests that more frequent and shorter sessions leads to better learning than having fewer but longer sessions now badly in long run in 1978 did a research study looking at postal workers and it basically looked at how they learned how to use a mail sorting machine keyboard it's essentially a keyboard that which none of them would have used before and the idea was they had to learn how to use this keyboard as quickly as possible so this keyboard basically they wanted to be quick at typing so that the mail was sorted into correct boxes so that it could be delivered by the different posties they had 60 hours practice time and that was spread over five days of each week but the distribution was actually spread out in four different ways the more distributed schedule is the one that's at the top so they were doing one-hour sessions once a day for 12 weeks working your way down the more mast schedule was two-hour sessions twice a day and that was actually happening much quicker over three weeks now the interesting thing is the aim of the training was to have them achieve 80 keystrokes a minute now you can see there on the right-hand column that's the number of hours that took each group to achieve the 80 keystrokes a minute so that's the criteria now aiming for so you can see at the top the less amount of hours was coming from the more distributed group that actually got to the 80 keystrokes in 55 hours working your way down the group that actually took the longest and some didn't actually even get to the 80 keystrokes a minute was the more master schedule so if you look at it you can see here in this diagram I'm actually gonna use my cursor to make it nice and easy to understand the clear or white circles is the more distributed so you can see here the correct keystrokes the higher they get is the more correct keystrokes they're getting a minute and down the bottom we've got the hours practiced so the steeper the improvement the better so it's showing this group did the best because I actually got up higher more quickly the group that took the longest and actually didn't achieve the highest amount of property improvement or the highest amount of keystrokes is the 2x2 which was the more massed schedule so you can see here the more distributed the better as far as for performance these last three sections is relating to retention so again they basically to make sure that the learning had been durable they actually tested them one month after three months after and then nine months after and you can see here again the group that actually finished off the worst was the more mashed training so they actually after nine months their performance had dropped right down the retention that performed the best was basically again the more distributed so looking at this information you can clearly see that the results indicate that there's a big advantage of learning via a distributed schedule over massed and interesting one of the things they did find actually asked the different groups which training schedule or practice schedule was the most popular interestingly the massed practice group actually thought that theirs was the best that they thought right are getting in doing lots of training really quickly so doing obviously two by twos over three weeks that was the best option but generally though more frequent and shorter sessions was found to lead to better results with some similarities was a study that was conducted again comparing massed and distributed this time this one was leading to a sport still so Dale and Christine in 2004 conducted a study that looked at whether or not a masked or distributed practice schedule would help novice golfers improve their cutting skills now you can see here now this isn't the exact apparatus but it's essentially the same thing it was an indoor padding mat the what they're actually testing was okay which shed was going to lead to improve paddock now the master group basically conducted the 240 paths in one session on one day and I had short breaks between blocks attempts they do 10 putts then they'd basically have a quick rest they do the next 10 putts have a rest and so on they repeated that up until the point that had 240 parts now the measurement was basically the distance the ball finished from the hole so if the ball went in the school would be 0 for that putt because it went in if it finished 5 centimeters from the hole the score was 5 if it was 20 centimeters it scores 20 if it ended up rolling off the mat then they got a score of 100 centimeters because the gap from the hole to the edge of the mat was saying metre so they basically wanted to have the lower the score the better your partying performance had been now the distributed group at the other hand had 60 putts and it was actually run over 4 sessions over 4 consecutive days so they basically did the 60 parts then they'd have a break in the next session that come in and have 60 and so on now the results showed that the distributed group performed better at the end of the practice so they basically added up the scores after the 240 parts and the distributed had done better but they also perform better on the retention tests so one day after and then also one week after the distributed group actually performed better in those retention tests so that the learning seemed to be more durable if you've been practicing and learning in the distributed group the take-home information I guess from those types of studies generally the more frequent and shorter sessions leads to better learning when you compare that to the fewer but longer sessions so distributed is better than massed if you're looking at the results of this research now when we're trying to actually explain the results that we're seeing that shows that distributed is actually better than massed there's three possible explanations that have been put forward now one is fatigue if you're in a more master schedule you could argue that there's more fatigue both mental and physical so you're not getting tired because you're not having enough rest another explanation is the fact that massed practice diminishes the amount of cognitive effort that's actually been used on each trial so you get to the point where because you've sort of sick of it you're bored you're not actually thinking about and putting as much effort into the next trial and probably as a result you're not going to get the same actual benefits now the memory consolidation hypothesis is the explanation that basically proposes that for learning to be stored in memory certain neuro biochemical processes must occur now these processes can only occur if there's a certain amount of time without additional practice of the same skill so if you're having massed and there's no real time to actually take in and absorb what's actually happening then these processes aren't occurring and therefore the learning that is being achieved isn't going to be as effective and it's probably not going to be as durable by far the greatest amount of research that's happened in the area of distribution of practice has investigated the length of the inter try interval so essentially the amount of rest between practice trials now the main question being how much rest to people need between practice trials to achieve their optimal level so again just to make sure in the same page master practice is when the amount of rest between trials is very short or non-existent so that practice is essentially continuous and distributed practice is when the amount of rest between trials is relatively large now even though there's been a great deal of research that's actually being conducted in this area there's been no real agreement on whether practice distribution actually affects learning now there's two main contributing factors to this or two problems performance versus learning effects now there's been a number of experiments that have not included retention or transfer test so you could argue that they're looking at immediate performance but they're not then seeing if the learning is durable and whether or not it's actually stuck and that's obviously when we find that by looking at retention or transport tests now the other problem is the different types of skills that have actually been examined now researchers have actually failed to consider that there may be different effects related to different skills so for example if a skill is discrete so that has a distinct start and finish as compared to say a continuous skill which is basically something like swimming or running or walking that so you could have a big influence there's been two reviews that have been conducted so again two meta analyses these have found that the type of task is very important so the research that's been conducted that's looked at continuous skills has compared masked and distributed schedules again the most popular type of study that's occurred relates to a rotary pursuit task so this is an example or a photo of the apparatus that's been used in these you can see there it's basically a piece of equipment that uses a stylus so the person or the participant is basically told that they have to try to keep their stylus or their pen in contact with that little white square that you can see here that little white square rotates around at a certain speed and their job is to see if they can keep their stylus in contact with that little white square for as long as possible during the practice the distributed groups led to better learning so the groups that actually had more distributed schedule they actually perform better and they also found that during retention and transfer tests again the distribute group performed just as well or better than again the mask group so for continuous skills the results show that the distributed schedule is best on the other hand when you're looking at discrete skills so skills that have a I started to find finished there's been very little research it's actually being conducted now probably the problem that's associated with this is because of operational definitions of massed and distributed practice a study by Lee and Genovese in 1989 found that there was only one study that had been conducted in 1969 by Karen and these results favored master practice over distributed for discrete skills so this was a big turning task and we don't really need to go into too much detail about it let's just say it's a discrete skill and again they found that the results of favoured massed practice in this scenario so if we're looking for the implications whether you're a coach teacher someone working in rehab if it's a continuous skill you are going to get better results if you use a distributed practice schedule so again they've shown examples they're walking swimming bicycling typing and so on at the other end if you're looking at discrete skills even though there's not been a hell of a lot of research that's been conducted the massed practice schedule is going to give you the best benefit so example if you're looking at hitting golf balls at the driving range because all you're going to be doing is hitting the shot then basically getting the next ball into position hitting the shot again there's going to be a very short amount of rest which means it's going to be happening over a short amount of time says it's a master schedule so therefore you would get better results practicing in this manner when trying to arrange the optimal learning environment an important issue is the amount of practice that is needed to reach a particular criterion so you might be asking the question of how much should my students or my athletes or my clients how much should they actually be practicing as discussed earlier in this lecture it's generally accepted that the more practice someone gets the better their achievements will be now interestingly though the research indicates that this is not always going to be the case now this might be due to the fact that the learner might reach a point where they're actually achieving what's known as diminishing returns so this basically means that in terms of the benefits they're getting from their practice in proportion to the amount of times they're not getting the same bang for their buck I suppose now here's probably a nice little that shows it you can see early on in the practice schedule it's a fairly steep improvement in the performance scores but after a while the diminishing return shows that the amount of improvement that they're achieving starts to level off so after a while they're not getting as much bang for their buck I suppose now a good example is machine gun assembly and disassembly so if you remember Forrest Gump in the movie he actually needs to learn how to put his gun together and take it apart essentially they find that when people are learning how to assemble and disassemble their gun they start to improve fairly dramatically early on but after a while that improvement starts to plateau a certain amount one of the terms that's popped up in this type of research is the term over learning now over learning is basically the continuation of practice beyond the amount needed to achieve a performance criterion so again it might be machine gun assembly and disassembly you might be required to put together and disassemble your gun and have it all done within five minutes so once they've achieved that level anything beyond that point is basically what's known as over learning now driscoll willis and copper in 92 conducted a review study and what they found was there's very limited research that's actually being conducted on the topic of over learning but they found that over learning has a positive influence on the retention performance and they found that the greater percentage that was practiced so you can put might have been 50 percent over learning which basically means if they had to achieve a certain criterion of say five minutes of assembling and disassembling the gun when they got to that point that might have taken them say ten hours to do so an addition of 50% training would be an additional five hours if you're looking at it took them ten hours and they're doing two hundred percent over learning it would mean that they were doing an additional twenty on top of that original ten now again they found that the over learning led to higher attention performances to a point so that means that after a while they weren't getting as much bang for their buck so therefore it wasn't going to be beneficial to keep doing that over learning training continuing on from the topic of over learning there's been a number of fairly well-known studies of over learning that have looked at procedural skills to make sure procedural skills are defined those skills that require a person to perform a series of discrete movements in a very specific particular order there's been a number of studies in military and industrial settings one of the better-known studies was conducted by Schendel and Hagman in 92 and this is one I mentioned earlier which was machine gun assembly and disassembly now the task that they were required to do was assembling and disassembling a machine gun and they had to keep doing it until they could complete the task without making any errors some of them may have been able to complete the task in two attempts so it was a task that they were familiar with but they had to actually do it without making any mistakes once they achieved that and they could actually assemble and disassemble the gun without making any errors they've been conducted over learning or over training so there was three groups there was an immediate overtraining and refresher and then an O over training group now the immediate over training and the refresher over training was basically a hundred percent additional or over learning if it took them five trials to complete it with no errors they did five additional trials because that would be a hundred percent the immediate over training group completed the over training straight away the refresher group completed their refresher over training one month after the initial training that no other training group they basically stopped so once they completed the actual task with no errors they stopped there now the results of these three groups showed that the over training groups so that's the immediate over training and the refresher groups they performed equally and both of those groups performed better than the know over training group so the over training was found to be effective they then had the decided I'll which one is going to be the better option now because they had no differences and the immediate and the refresher were both as effective as each other it was then deemed that the immediate overtraining would be the better option because it's cheaper they could actually complete or conduct the overtraining straight away without needing to ship off the soldiers and then ship them back to the same venue to redo their training so because they'll both assign you definitely stick with the cheaper option which was the immediate over try another area of research that's been conducted in the past has looked at dynamic balance now you can see here in this diagram this is a diagram of a stable ammeter which is basically a research apparatus that examines a participants relative stability so you can see there that wooden platform that the participant is standing on his task is to see if he can keep that platform perfectly horizontal for as long as possible now any slight movement will cause that platform to swing to the left and the right so that person then has to regain their balance and try to keep it horizontal so Melnik study we look at specifically was conducted in 71 now they're specifically in this study for groups now there was a zero percent 50 percent hundred percent and 200 percent extra practice so basically it would mean after achieving a certain criterion that participant depending on what group they're in would do that amount of overall extra practice now the results showed that the group who did 50 percent extra practice perform better than the zero group but they also performed just as well as the hundred and two hundred percent extra group so you are seeing a really clear indication of the point of diminishing returns so this would tell us that there's no real benefit that can be gained by doing more than 50 percent over learning because there's no real extra improvement because of this diminishing return that we're actually seeing now that's us done for today in this lecture if you want to do some further reading in this area there's some references but for the moment we're all done thanks guys