PDFE #14: Structuring Practices

For this in-class experiment, we paired up with partners to practice learning how to juggle.  My partner was Lindsay Cope. I practiced learning juggling by a part practice method and she tried learning by a whole practice method. Part practice is where you learn one separate discrete task that is only a small part of the overall task. Once you have mastered that part, you add on the next little piece of the task and so on until you are working on the entire skill. This method of part practice is called segmentation.  On the other hand, whole practice is where you just work on the learning the task as a whole and you don't break it down into components.  To do this lab, I first practiced 10 trials (5 practices a trial) of just tossing one ball up and into the other hand while Lindsay graded how well I did and if I had any errors. Then I took a minute break and did 10 trials of tossing two balls, one from left to right and during the peak, the other from right to left.  I took another 1 minute break and then added a third ball  while I threw when the second one peaked for another 10 trials, but I did not have to catch any of the balls. Finally, after another break, I worked on throwing all three balls in a pattern back and forth but this time I only did 10 tries, instead of the usual 50.  After I had finished those tries, I took a 5 minute break and then tested 5 tries to see how well I had retained my juggling skills while Lindsay counted the number of times I caught a ball.  After I did this, Lindsay did 10 tries of practicing the whole skill while I counted her number of catches, then she took a minute break, tried another 10 times, etc. for 4 rotations. After that, she took a 5 minute break and then did 5 tries while I counted the number of times she caught a ball for each try.  For this skill, I did slightly better for my average for the 5 retention tries, but the difference between our average was only a few tenths away from each other.  These results did match my expectations based on the reading.  I think overall, when a person is first learning juggling, part practice helps because it teaches people about how high to throw the ball and how to correctly throw the balls in the right order. However, as practice continues, part practice can actually hinder performance. The book says that "the least likely candidates for effective part practice are rapid, discrete skills or skills that require bimanual coordination." Juggling fits this description because the skills are all rapidly strung together and each hand is doing something different.  Therefore, I think part practice helped me at first but in the end, it did not give me a huge advantage over Lindsay because I had concentrated on the parts so much that I sometimes lost sight of how it all fit in with the big picture.  Some other factors that could have influenced the results are natural hand eye-coordination, space to move around in, who went first while the other person watched, and concentration.