Tag: PE

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2221311120

Students do need extensive practice, about seven opportunities per component of knowledge. Students do not show substantial differences in their rate of learning.

 First, across a variety of courses, we found that initial practice performance is quite modest, about 65% correct (i.e., a failing grade), despite the general availability of up-front verbal instruction, such as lectures and readings. Second, we found that reaching a reasonable level of mastery (80% correct) requires substantial repeated practice, typically about seven practice opportunities. These results are consistent with learning theories suggesting induction from examples and doing is prominent in human learning.

That up-front lectures and readings seem to produce limited performance accuracy is surprising given the great efforts educators continue to put into producing lectures and texts and given that most learners advocate explicit learning as the best way to learn. […]  A theoretical postulate consistent with limited accuracy after up-front verbal instruction is that human learning is not simply about the explicit processing, encoding, and retrieval of verbal instruction but as much or more about implicit or nonverbal learning-by-doing in varied practice tasks where interactive feedback is available.

Koedinger, K. R., Carvalho, P. F., Liu, R., & McLaughlin, E. A. (2023). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(13). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2221311120