Quotes About Practice

When you space out practice at a task and get a little rusty between sessions, or you interleave the practice of two or more subjects, retrieval is harder and feels less productive, but the effort produces longer lasting learning and enables more versatile application of it in later settings. Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt.

Practice that's spaced out, interleaved with other learning, and varied produces better mastery, longer retention, and more versatility. But these benefits come at a price: when practice is spaced, interleaved, and varied, it requires more effort. You feel the increased effort, but not the benefits the effort produces. Learning feels slower from this kind of practice, and you don't get the rapid improvements and affirmations you're accustomed to seeing from massed practice.

It's not just what you know, but how you practice what you know that determines how well the learning serves you later.

Retrieval practice—recalling facts or concepts or events from memory—is a more effective learning strategy than review by rereading. Flashcards are a simple example. Retrieval strengthens the memory and interrupts forgetting. A single, simple quiz after reading a text or hearing a lecture produces better learning and remembering than rereading the text or reviewing lecture notes.

Third, learning is an acquired skill, and the most effective strategies are often counterintuitive.

Spaced and interleaved exposure characterizes most of humans' normal experience.

It's thought that this heightened sensitivity to similarities and differences during interleaved practice leads to the encoding of more complex and nuanced representations of the study material—a better understanding of how specimens or types of problems are distinctive and why they call for a different interpretation or solution.

When you space out practice at a task and get a little rusty between sessions, or you interleave the practice of two or more subjects, retrieval is harder and feels less productive, but the effort produces longer lasting learning and enables more versatile application of it in later settings.

Mastery in any field, from cooking to chess to brain surgery, is a gradual accretion of knowledge, conceptual understanding, judgment, and skill. These are the fruits of variety in the practice of new skills, and of striving, reflection, and mental rehearsal.

Rereading text and massed practice of a skill or new knowledge are by far the preferred study strategies of learners of all stripes, but they're also among the least productive.

If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you'll have to do that too.

Doctors don't go through life mentally integrating trial results; but any automaton who had regulated his practice that way would have been in danger of underprescribing.

Probably for the first time in my life I was beginning to comprehend that trust was a habit I would need to cultivate.

I never hear you practice." He smiled: "Only those who are dirty need to wash.

You are to practice My judgments and keep My statutes by walking in them. I am the LORD your God.

You are to keep My commandments and practice them. I am the LORD.

Tie them as reminders on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.

ëCursed is he who does not put the words of this law into practice.í And let all the people say, ëAmen!í

For Ezra had set his heart to study the Law of the LORD, to practice it, and to teach its statutes and ordinances in Israel.

but if you return to Me and keep and practice My commandments, then even if your exiles have been banished to the farthest horizon, I will gather them from there and bring them to the place I have chosen as a dwelling for My Name.í

This is my practice, for I obey Your precepts.

I am the LORD your God; walk in My statutes, keep My ordinances, and practice them.

So My people come to you as usual, sit before you, and hear your words; but they do not put them into practice. Although they express love with their mouths, their hearts pursue dishonest gain.

Indeed, you are to them like a singer of love songs with a beautiful voice, who skillfully plays an instrument. They hear your words but do not put them into practice.