Cynthia Pace - Pedagogy Thoughts
Recent Studies & Piano Teaching: 
Plain Old Practice Trumps Conceptual Learning? — Not Quite

• It isn’t enough for teachers to consistently model beautiful phrasing, to use a musical term frequently, or to clap a rhythmic pattern in unison with students. Students need to independently reconstruct learning, often and continuously.

activate_learning

A Look at a New Study:
Retrieval Practice Produces More Learning than 
Elaborative Studying with Concept Mapping (January 2011)

By Jeffrey D. Karpicke and Janell R. Blunt, Reported in Science (Online), January 2011 (10.1126/science)

   __________
Retrieval is not merely a read out of the knowledge stored 

in one's mind. The act of reconstructing knowledge itself 
enhances learning.  - Karpicke/Blunt -
  __________


This recent experiment found that giving students recall tests is not simply a way of measuring learning. Instead, periodic testing, or, the practicing of information retrieval, is, itself, essential to the learning process. In this experiment, different groups of students studied a text under different circumstances:

One group of students, “concept mappers” studied by mapping concept relationships, on paper, as they studied the text during several sessions. (A similar activity in piano lessons, might be asking the student to find and label patterns and sequences, form, harmonies, etc., on a page of music the student is working on). 

Another group, “test takers,”  studied for the same amount of time. However, their study method included taking several pretests in which they wrote down all they could recall about the material without looking at the text. Between tests, these students went back and reviewed their text.

Results: The concept mapping group did less well than the test takers on final tests taken by both groups.

......But wait......This is not a criticism of Conceptual Learning...
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